Seamus Heaney

In a war situation or where violence and injustice are prevalent, poetry is called upon to be something more than a thing of beauty.

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

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.

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.

As a young poet, you need corroboration, and that's what publication does.

I've always associated the moment of writing with a moment of lift, of joy, of unexpected reward.

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

Write whatever you like!

The poet is on the side of undeceiving the world.

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

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

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

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.

Getting started keeping going getting started again in art and in life it seems to me this is the essential rhythm not only of achievement but of survival the ground of convinced action the basis of self esteem and the guarantee of credibility in your lives credibility to yourselves as well as to others.

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

I have always thought of poems as stepping stones in one's own sense of oneself. Every now and again, you write a poem that gives you self-respect and steadies your going a little bit farther out in the stream. At the same time, you have to conjure the next stepping stone because the stream, we hope, keeps flowing.

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

Even if the last move did not succeed, the inner command says move again.

In my early teens, I acquired a kind of representative status: went on behalf of the family to wakes and funerals and so on. And I would be counted on as an adult contributor when it came to farm work - the hay in the summertime, for example.

History says, 'Don't hope on this side of the grave.'

If you have the words theres always a chance that youll find the way.

My passport's green.

The Ireland I now inhabit is one that these Irish contemporaries have helped to imagine.

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

Without needing to be theoretically instructed, consciousness quickly realizes that it is the site of variously contending discourses.

Whether it be a matter of personal relations within a marriage or political initiatives within a peace process, there is no sure-fire do-it-yourself kit.

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.

I feel myself part of something. Not only being part of a community but part of an actual moment and a movement of Irish writing and art. That sense of being part of the whole thing is the deepest joy.

My father was a creature of the archaic world, really. He would have been entirely at home in a Gaelic hill-fort. His side of the family, and the houses I associate with his side of the family, belonged to a traditional rural Ireland.

I always believed that whatever had to be written would somehow get itself written.

As writers and readers, as sinners and citizens, our realism and our aesthetic sense make us wary of crediting the positive note.

I think the first little jolt I got was reading Gerard Manley Hopkins - I liked other poems... but Hopkins was kind of electric for me - he changed the rules with speech, and the whole intensity of the language was there and so on.

I credit poetry for making this space-walk possible.

In poetry, everything can be faked but the intensity of utterance.

Human beings suffer, they torture one another, they get hurt and get hard.No poem or play or song can fully right a wrong inflicted or endured.

It's difficult to learn poems off by heart that don't rhyme.

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

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.

I've said it before about the Nobel Prize: it's like being struck by a more or less benign avalanche. It was unexpected, unlooked for, and extraordinary.

One doesn't want one's identity coerced.

I'm a firm believer in learning by heart.

I suppose you inevitably fall into habits of expression.

I don't think my intelligence is naturally analytic or political.

A person from Northern Ireland is naturally cautious.

In the United States, in poetry workshops, it's now quite a thing to make graduate students learn poems by heart.

My father and mother had no sense of entitlement for their children.

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

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

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've been in the habit of helping people.

Anybody serious about poetry knows how hard it is to achieve anything worthwhile in it.

If you go into an underground train in London - probably anywhere, but chiefly in London - there's that sense of almost entering a ghostly dimension. People are very still and quiet; they don't exchange many pleasantries.

The kinds of truth that art gives us many, many times are small truths. They don't have the resonance of an encyclical from the Pope stating an eternal truth, but they partake of the quality of eternity. There is a sort of timeless delight in them.

I've nothing against the Queen personally. I had lunch at the Palace once upon a time.

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.

One of the best descriptions of the type of writer I am was given by Tom Paulin, who described himself as a 'binge' writer - like a binge drinker. I go on binges.

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

Sonnet is about movement in a form.

Loyalism, or Unionism, or Protestantism, or whatever you want to call it, in Northern Ireland - it operates not as a class system, but a caste system.

Anyone born and bred in Northern Ireland can't be too optimistic.

What I've said before, only half in joke, is that everybody in Ireland is famous. Or, maybe better, say everybody is familiar.

In a way, Anglo-Saxon poetry cannot be translated.

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

The murder of Sean Brown hurt my soul.

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.

Eternal life can mean utter reverence for life itself.

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

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.

The completely solitary self: that's where poetry comes from, and it gets isolated by crisis, and those crises are often very intimate also.

Poetry is more a threshold than a path.

Yeats was 18th-century oratory, almost.

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

You can have Irish identity in the north and also have your Irish passport.

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.

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

In fact, in lyric poetry, truthfulness becomes recognizable as a ring of truth within the medium itself.

The Heaneys were aristocrats, in the sense that they took for granted a code of behavior that was given and unspoken. Argumentation, persuasion, speech itself, for God's sake, just seemed otiose and superfluous to them.

There is risk and truth to yourselves and the world before you.

The experimental poetry thing is not my thing. It's a programme of the avant-garde: basically a refusal of the kind of poetry I write.

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

The faking of feelings is a sin against the imagination.