Seamus Heaney

“Even if the hopes you started out with are dashed, hope has to be maintained.”

“A public expectation, it has to be said, not of poetry as such but of political positions variously approvable by mutually disapproving groups.”

“Whether it be a matter of personal relations within a marriage or political initiatives within a peace process, there is no sure-fire do-it-yourself kit.”

“Dylan Thomas is now as much a case history as a chapter in the history of poetry.”

“The faking of feelings is a sin against the imagination.”

“If poetry and the arts do anything, they can fortify your inner life, your inwardness.”

“If you go into an underground train in London - probably anywhere, but chiefly in London - there's that sense of almost entering a ghostly dimension. People are very still and quiet; they do...”

“In the United States, in poetry workshops, it's now quite a thing to make graduate students learn poems by heart.”

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

“I think of Dermot Healy as the heir to Patrick Kavanagh.”

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

“I think the first little jolt I got was reading Gerard Manley Hopkins - I liked other poems... but Hopkins was kind of electric for me - he changed the rules with speech, and the whole inten...”

“The amount of sensory material stored up or stored down in the brain's and the body's systems is inestimable. It's like a culture at the bottom of a jar, although it doesn't grow, I think, o...”

“I'm not personally obsessed with death. At a certain age, the light that you live in is inhabited by the shades - it 'tis.”

“But that citizen's perception was also at one with the truth in recognizing that the very brutality of the means by which the IRA were pursuing change was destructive of the trust upon which...”

“Manifesting that order of poetry where we can at last grow up to that which we stored up as we grew.”

“My point is there's a hidden Scotland in anyone who speaks the Northern Ireland speech. It's a terrific complicating factor, not just in Northern Ireland, but Ireland generally.”

“Anyone born and bred in Northern Ireland can't be too optimistic.”

“A person from Northern Ireland is naturally cautious.”

“Loyalism, or Unionism, or Protestantism, or whatever you want to call it, in Northern Ireland - it operates not as a class system, but a caste system.”