The thing about writing is that if you have the impulse, you will find the time. — Seamus Heaney Copy Share Image
I always believed that whatever had to be written would somehow get itself written. — Seamus Heaney Copy Share Image
I always had a superstitious fear of setting up a too well-designed writing place and then finding that the writing had absconded. — Seamus Heaney Copy Share Image
My experience is that prose usually equals duty - last minute, overdue-deadline stuff or a panic lecture to be written. — Seamus Heaney Copy Share Image
A writer is not different from a reader, in that the common ragbag of orthodoxies and assumptions is what a poet has… — Seamus Heaney Copy Share Image
The gift of writing is to be self-forgetful … to get a surge of inner life or inner supply or unexpected sense… — Seamus Heaney Copy Share Image
One of the best descriptions of the type of writer I am was given by Tom Paulin, who described himself as a… — Seamus Heaney Copy Share Image
I've always associated the moment of writing with a moment of lift, of joy, of unexpected reward. — Seamus Heaney Copy Share Image
Irish readers, British readers, American readers: is it odd that I haven't a clue about how differently they react? Or better say,… — Seamus Heaney Copy Share Image
The main thing is to write for the joy of it. Cultivate a work-lust that imagines its haven like your hands at… — Seamus Heaney Copy Share Image
Publication is rather like pushing the boat out; then the boat/book turns into a melting ice floe and you have to conjure… — Seamus Heaney Copy Share Image
The whole relationship between a writer's spiritual/emotional condition and the kind of wordstuff and form-making that's going on in his work is… — Seamus Heaney Copy Share Image
It is very true to say that work done by writers is quite often an attempt to give solid expression to that… — Seamus Heaney Copy Share Image
You had to come back to learn how to lose yourself, to be pilot and stray-witch, Hansel and Gretel in one. — Seamus Heaney Copy Share
If self is a location, so is love: Bearings taken, markings, cardinal points, Options, obstinacies, dug heels, and distance, Here and there and now… — Seamus Heaney Copy Share
I'm very conscious that people dear to me are alive in my imagination - poets in particular. — Seamus Heaney Copy Share
Once I was on the job, once I had got started, I felt safe enough, but the anticipation made me tense. — Seamus Heaney Copy Share
You can have Irish identity in the north and also have your Irish passport. — Seamus Heaney Copy Share
The external reality and inner dynamic of happenings in Northern Ireland between 1968 and 1974 were symptomatic of change, violent change admittedly, but change… — Seamus Heaney Copy Share
One of the very first poems I wrote was Docker That fist would drop a hammer on a Catholic and one of the sturdiest… — Seamus Heaney Copy Share
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… — Seamus Heaney Copy Share
Poetry is always slightly mysterious, and you wonder what is your relationship to it. — Seamus Heaney Copy Share
Sink every impulse like a bolt. Secure The bastion of sensation. Do not waver Into language. Do not waver in it. — Seamus Heaney Copy Share
“It is said that once upon a time St. Kevin was kneeling with his arms stretched out in the form of a cross in… — Seamus Heaney Copy Share
