Quotes from Seamus Heaney

The kind of poet who founds and reconstitutes values is somebody like Yeats or Whitman - these are public value-founders.

Manifesting that order of poetry where we can at last grow up to that which we stored up as we grew.

Poetry is what we do to break bread with the dead.

I credit poetry for making this space-walk possible.

I'm very conscious that people dear to me are alive in my imagination - poets in particular.

Nowadays, what an award gives is a sense of solidarity with the poetry guild, as it were: sustenance coming from the assent of your peers on the judging panel.

Poems that come swiftly are usually the ones that you keep.

Poetry is always slightly mysterious, and you wonder what is your relationship to it.

The amount of sensory material stored up or stored down in the brain's and the body's systems is inestimable. It's like a culture at the bottom of a jar, although it doesn't grow, I think, or help anything else to grow unless you find a way to reach it and touch it.

To encounter 'Beowulf' is like taking a sledgehammer to a quarry face. You must bang in there.

When I first encountered the name of the city of Stockholm, I little thought that I would ever visit it, never mind end up being welcomed to it as a guest of the Swedish Academy and the Nobel Foundation.

I came from a farming background, and my career was teaching.

The gift of writing is to be self-forgetful... to get a surge of inner life or inner supply or unexpected sense of empowerment, to be afloat, to be out of yourself.

Your temperament is what you write with, but it's also how you deal with the world.

Desmond O'Grady is one of the senior figures in Irish Literary life, exemplary in the way he has committed himself over the decades to the vocation of poetry and has lived selflessly for the art

In Northern Ireland, helicopters are not usually used to promote poetry.

My experience is that prose usually equals duty - last minute, overdue-deadline stuff or a panic lecture to be written.

I have begun to think of life as a series of ripples widening out from an original center.

My point is there's a hidden Scotland in anyone who speaks the Northern Ireland speech. It's a terrific complicating factor, not just in Northern Ireland, but Ireland generally.

I think of the bog as a feminine goddess-ridden ground, rather like the territory of Ireland itself.

The fact of the matter is that the most unexpected and miraculous thing in my life was the arrival in it of poetry itself - as a vocation and an elevation almost.

A public expectation, it has to be said, not of poetry as such but of political positions variously approvable by mutually disapproving groups.

If poetry and the arts do anything, they can fortify your inner life, your inwardness.

Then as the years went on and my listening became more deliberate, I would climb up on an arm of our big sofa to get my ear closer to the wireless speaker.