Seamus Heaney quotes:

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

I think that water is immediately interesting. It's just, as an element, it is full of life. It is associated with origin; it is bright - it reflects you.

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

My language and my sensibility are yearning to admit a kind of religious or transcendent dimension. But then there's the reality: there's no Heaven, no afterlife of the sort we were promised, and no personal God.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

I spend almost every morning with mail.

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

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.

I don't do as many readings as I used to. There was a time when I was on the road a lot more, at home in Ireland, in Britain, in Canada and the States, a time when I had more stamina and appetite for it.

Poetry is more a threshold than a path.

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

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

I credit poetry for making this space-walk possible.

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

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.

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

Poetry is a domestic art, most itself when most at home.

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

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

Dylan Thomas is now as much a case history as a chapter in the history of poetry.

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

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

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

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

Tom Sleigh's poetry is hard-earned and well founded. I great admire the way it refuses to cut emotional corners and yet achieves a sense of lyric absolution.

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.

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.

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 been in the habit of helping people.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

I suppose you inevitably fall into habits of expression.

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

I might enjoy being an albatross, being able to glide for days and daydream for hundreds of miles along the thermals. And then being able to hang like an affliction round some people's necks.

Once off the bush The fruit fermented, the sweet flesh would turn sour. I always felt like crying. It wasn't fair That all the lovely canfuls smelt of rot. Each year I hoped they'd keep, knew they would not. -Blackberry picking

My body was braille for the creeping influences.

It has as much to do with the energy released by linguistic fission and fusion, with the buoyancy generated by cadence and tone and rhyme and stanza, as it has to do with the poem's concerns or the poet's truthfulness.

I am not a playwright. A playwright would take Antigone and hit it a few clouts and knock it out of shape and restructure it. My versioning was strictly verbal.

Anyone with gumption and a sharp mind will take the measure of two things: what's said and what's done.

The gift of writing is to be self-forgetful

The ability to start out upon your own impulse is fundamental to the gift of keeping going upon your own terms. . . . Getting started, keeping going, getting started again in art and in life, it seems to me this is the essential rhythm.

You had to come back to learn how to lose yourself, to be pilot and stray-witch, Hansel and Gretel in one.

It is always better to avenge dear ones than to indulge in mourning. For every one of us, living in this world means waiting for our end. Let whoever can win glory before death. When a warrior is gone, that will be his best and only bulwark.

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.

The aim of poetry and the poet is finally to be of service, to ply the effort of the individual into the larger work of the community as a whole.

Hope for a great sea-change timid to rebuke and too petty to forgive

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

All I know is a door into the dark

Believe that a further shore is reachable from here.

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

I always had a superstitious fear of setting up a too well-designed writing place and then finding that the writing had absconded.

Sonnet is about movement in a form.

The murder of Sean Brown hurt my soul.

The main thing is to write for the joy of it. Cultivate a work-lust that imagines its haven like your hands at night dreaming the sun in the sunspot of a breast. You are fasted now, light-headed, dangerous. Take off from here.

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

Suspect too much sweet talk but never close your mind.

Memory has always been fundamental for me. In fact, remembering what I had forgotten is the way most of the poems get started.

My passport's green.

The bogholes might be Atlantic seepage. The wet centre is bottomless.

Yeats was 18th-century oratory, almost.

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.

The problem as you get older... is that you become more self-aware. At the same time, you have to surprise yourself. There's no way of arranging the surprise, so it is tricky.

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.

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

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

I'm a firm believer in learning by heart.

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.

It is very true to say that work done by writers is quite often an attempt to give solid expression to that which is bothering them... They feel they have got it right if they express the stress.

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

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

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

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

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.

The day I entered St Columb's College, my parents bought me a Conway Stewart pen. It was a special afternoon, of course. We were going to be parting that evening; they were aware of it, I was aware of it, nothing much was said about it.

The faking of feelings is a sin against the imagination.

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

There's never going to be a united Ireland, you know.

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

The group of writers I had grown up with in the '60s - Derek Mahon, Michael Longley, James Simmons, John Hewitt, Paul Muldoon - formed a very necessary and self-sustaining group.

Eternal life can mean utter reverence for life itself.

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

Anything Can Happen is also, incidentally, a poem that arose from teaching. I'd talked about the Horace Ode (I, 34) [on which the poem is based] in a lecture I gave at Harvard in the fall of 2000 entitled Bright Boltsand remembered it after the Twin Towers attack.

Anything Can Happen, on the other hand, is not only about the atrociousness of the September 11 attack, it is also a premonition of the deadly retaliation that was bound to come.

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

Behaviour that's admired is the path to power among people everywhere.

Believe that a further shore...is reachable from here.

Best to say that once a poem is finished I trust it to make its way, and I trust readers will find their way to it and through it, if the thing has got itself rightly expressed.

Between my finger and my thumb The squat pen rests; snug as a gun. ~from the poem "Digging

But even so, none of the news of these world-spasms entered me as terror.

Debate doesn't really change things. It gets you bogged in deeper. If you can address or reopen the subject with something new, something from a different angle, then there is some hope. ... People are suddenly gazing at something else and pausing for a moment. And for the duration of that gaze and pause, they are like reflectors of the totality of their own knowledge and/or ignorance. That's something poetry can do for you, it can entrance you for a moment above the pool of your own consciousness and your own possibilities.

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

Don't be surprised if I demur, for, be advised my passport's green.

Even though Helen Vendler wasn't on the Harvard faculty when I came first in 1979, she was a guardian spirit; Robert Fitzgerald gave me the use of his study in Pusey Library. Monroe and Brenda Engel kept open house, Bob and Jana Kiely made me at home in Adams House. Then, too, in 1979, Frank Bidart, whom Id met in Dublin after the death of Robert Lowell he was over seeing Caroline Blackwood Frank brought me into his circle of friends, including Robert Pinsky and Alan Williamson.

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

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.

God is a foreman with certain definite views Who orders life in shifts of work and leisure.

Harvard created wonderful conditions for me as a writerbut the writing was done, almost entirely, when I got home.

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

History says, Don't hope On this side of the grave, But then, once in a lifetime The longed-for tidal wave Of justice can rise up, And hope and history rhyme