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
“Between my finger and my thumb The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.” — Seamus Heaney Copy Share Image
Your temperament is what you write with, but it's also how you deal with the world. — 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
I always believed that whatever had to be written would somehow get itself written. — Seamus Heaney Copy Share Image
The most exhilarating for the writer and the reader, are gift-things-poems which arrive on their own energy, poems that in William Shakespeare's… — 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
As writers and readers, as sinners and citizens, our realism and our aesthetic sense make us wary of crediting the positive note. — Seamus Heaney Copy Share Image
The group of writers I had grown up with in the '60s - Derek Mahon, Michael Longley, James Simmons, John Hewitt, Paul… — 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
I feel myself part of something. Not only being part of a community but part of an actual moment and a movement… — Seamus Heaney Copy Share Image
Harvard created wonderful conditions for me as a writerbut the writing was done, almost entirely, when I got home. — 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
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
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
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
The thing about writing is that if you have the impulse, you will find the time. — Seamus Heaney Copy Share Image
The poems I did write there [in Harvard] include Alphabets the 1984 Phi Beta Kappa poem and A Sofa in the Forties.… — Seamus Heaney Copy Share Image
Harvard meant a lot in my writing life from the beginning, even though I didnt actually do much composition on the spot. — Seamus Heaney Copy Share Image
I have always thought of poems as stepping stones in one's own sense of oneself. Every now and again, you write a… — 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
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 Image
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 Image
I'm very conscious that people dear to me are alive in my imagination - poets in particular. — Seamus Heaney Copy Share Image
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 Image
You can have Irish identity in the north and also have your Irish passport. — Seamus Heaney Copy Share Image
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 Image
Hope for a great sea-change timid to rebuke and too petty to forgive — Seamus Heaney Copy Share Image
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 Image
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 Image
Poetry is always slightly mysterious, and you wonder what is your relationship to it. — Seamus Heaney Copy Share Image
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 Image
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