Seamus Heaney

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

“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 fami...”

“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 ot...”

“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.”

“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.”

“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 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 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.”

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

“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 st...”

“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 farthe...”

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

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

“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...”

“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 wa...”