Quotes from Seamus Heaney

We go to poetry, we go to literature in general, to be forwarded within ourselves.

I suppose you could say my father's world was Thomas Hardy and my mother's D.H. Lawrence.

Harvard meant a lot in my writing life from the beginning, even though I didnt actually do much composition on the spot.

I would say that something important for me and for my generation in Northern Ireland was the 1947 Education Act, which allowed students who won scholarships to go on to secondary schools and thence to university.

Every time you read a poem aloud to yourself in the presence of others, you are reading it into yourself and them. Voice helps to carry words farther and deeper than the eye.

Poetry is more a threshold than a path.

The thing about writing is that if you have the impulse, you will find the time.

I don't miss teaching. I'm learning to take my time for myself.

The experiment of poetry, as far as I am concerned, happens when the poem carries you beyond where you could have reasonably expected to go.

Since I was a schoolboy, I've been used to being recognized on the road by old and young, and being bantered with and, indeed, being taunted.

But that citizen's perception was also at one with the truth in recognizing that the very brutality of the means by which the IRA were pursuing change was destructive of the trust upon which new possibilities would have to be based.

I'm a firm believer in learning by heart.

I think of Dermot Healy as the heir to Patrick Kavanagh.

I've been in the habit of helping people.

I'm not personally obsessed with death. At a certain age, the light that you live in is inhabited by the shades - it 'tis.

I shouldered a kind of manhoodstepping in to lift the coffinsof dead relations.

And that moment when the bird sings very closeTo the music of what happens.

You lose more of yourself than you redeemDoing the decent thing.

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

At home in Ireland, there's a habit of avoidance, an ironical attitude towards the authority figure.

I credit poetry for making this space-walk possible.

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

Even if the hopes you started out with are dashed, hope has to be maintained.

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