A biography for Seamus Heaneyhasn’t been written yet.
“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.”
“I rhymeTo see myself, to set the darkness echoing.”
“I'm very conscious that people dear to me are alive in my imagination - poets in particular.”
“History says, Don’t hopeOn this side of the grave,But then, once in a lifetimeThe longed-for tidal waveOf justice can rise up,And hope and history rhyme”
“Even if the hopes you started out with are dashed, hope has to be maintained.”
“I always had a superstitious fear of setting up a too well-designed writing place and then finding that the writing had absconded.”
“Fate goes ever as fate must.”
“Anyone born and bred in Northern Ireland can't be too optimistic.”
“All I know is a door into the dark”
“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.”
“Even if the last move did not succeed, the inner command says move again.”
“As a young poet, you need corroboration, and that's what publication does.”
“I suppose you could say my father's world was Thomas Hardy and my mother's D.H. Lawrence.”
“In the United States, in poetry workshops, it's now quite a thing to make graduate students learn poems by heart.”
“The end of art is peace.”
“History says, 'Don't hope on this side of the grave.'”
“In Northern Ireland, helicopters are not usually used to promote poetry.”
“Poems that come swiftly are usually the ones that you keep.”
“The Ireland I now inhabit is one that these Irish contemporaries have helped to imagine.”
“My experience is that prose usually equals duty - last minute, overdue-deadline stuff or a panic lecture to be written.”