Writer Quotes by Seamus Heaney

Write whatever you like!

— Seamus Heaney

The gift of writing is to be self-forgetful

— Seamus Heaney

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

— Seamus Heaney

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

— Seamus Heaney

A writer is not different from a reader, in that the common ragbag of orthodoxies and assumptions is what a poet has…

— Seamus Heaney

The gift of writing is to be self-forgetful … to get a surge of inner life or inner supply or unexpected sense…

— Seamus Heaney

One of the best descriptions of the type of writer I am was given by Tom Paulin, who described himself as a…

— Seamus Heaney

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

— Seamus Heaney

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

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

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

— Seamus Heaney

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

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

It is very true to say that work done by writers is quite often an attempt to give solid expression to that…

— Seamus Heaney

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