Seamus Heaney

“I would say that something important for me and for my generation in Northern Ireland was the 1947 Education Act, which allowed students who won scholarships to go on to secondary schools an...”

“Yeats was 18th-century oratory, almost.”

“The kinds of truth that art gives us many, many times are small truths. They don't have the resonance of an encyclical from the Pope stating an eternal truth, but they partake of the quality...”

“As a young poet, you need corroboration, and that's what publication does.”

“To encounter 'Beowulf' is like taking a sledgehammer to a quarry face. You must bang in there.”

“I don't do as many readings as I used to. There was a time when I was on the road a lot more, at home in Ireland, in Britain, in Canada and the States, a time when I had more stamina and app...”

“In fact, in lyric poetry, truthfulness becomes recognizable as a ring of truth within the medium itself.”

“I have begun to think of life as a series of ripples widening out from an original center.”

“Since I was a schoolboy, I've been used to being recognized on the road by old and young, and being bantered with and, indeed, being taunted.”

“You yourself don't have to be shaken by mortal danger in order to feel your mortality.”

“Then as the years went on and my listening became more deliberate, I would climb up on an arm of our big sofa to get my ear closer to the wireless speaker.”

“Sonnet is about movement in a form.”

“When I first encountered the name of the city of Stockholm, I little thought that I would ever visit it, never mind end up being welcomed to it as a guest of the Swedish Academy and the Nobe...”

“I always had a superstitious fear of setting up a too well-designed writing place and then finding that the writing had absconded.”

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

“Poetry is more a threshold than a path.”

“My language and my sensibility are yearning to admit a kind of religious or transcendent dimension. But then there's the reality: there's no Heaven, no afterlife of the sort we were promised...”

“In poetry, everything can be faked but the intensity of utterance.”

“As writers and readers, as sinners and citizens, our realism and our aesthetic sense make us wary of crediting the positive note.”

“The kind of poet who founds and reconstitutes values is somebody like Yeats or Whitman - these are public value-founders.”