Seamus Heaney

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

— Seamus Heaney

I spend almost every morning with mail.

— Seamus Heaney

“Then I thought of the tribe whose dances never fail / For they keep dancing till they sight the deer.”

— Seamus Heaney

“Meanwhile, the sword began to wilt into gory icicles, to slather and thaw. It was a wonderful thing, the way it all…

— Seamus Heaney

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

— Seamus Heaney

To begin with, I wanted that truth to life to possess a concrete reliability, and rejoiced most when the poem seemed most…

— Seamus Heaney

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

— Seamus Heaney

I felt implicated in American affairs.Outraged at the blatant lies about Iraqs involvement in al Qaeda, at the regimes arrogance and stupidity,…

— Seamus Heaney

On the contrary, a trust in the staying power and travel-worthiness of such good should encourage us to credit the possibility of…

— Seamus Heaney

The kinds of truth that art gives us many, many times are small truths. They don't have the resonance of an encyclical…

— Seamus Heaney

“Don’t have the veins bulging in your biro.”

— Seamus Heaney

Debate doesn’t really change things. It gets you bogged in deeper. If you can address or reopen the subject with something new,…

— Seamus Heaney

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

— 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

“I want away to the house of death, to my father under the low, clay roof.”

— Seamus Heaney

“To work, her dumb lunge says, is to move a certain mass ...through a certain distance, is to pull your weight and…

— Seamus Heaney

It is difficult at times to repress the thought that history is about as instructive as an abattoir; that Tacitus was right…

— Seamus Heaney

Walk on air against your better judgement.

— 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

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

— Seamus Heaney

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

— Seamus Heaney

The appointment [in Harvard] gave me economic safety, writerly support, and intellectual self-respectplus eight months to myself every year.

— Seamus Heaney

“Is there life before death? That’s chalked up In Ballymurphy. Competence with pain, Coherent miseries, a bite and a sup, We hug…

— Seamus Heaney

The aim of poetry and the poet is finally to be of service, to ply the effort of the individual into the…

— 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