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" 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 intensity of the language was there and so on. "

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" 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, and no personal God. "

Seamus Heaney

Reality

Language

Kind

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

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

Seamus Heaney

Face

You

" The end of art is peace. "

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

" My passport's green. "

Seamus Heaney

Green

Passport

" Even if the last move did not succeed, the inner command says move again. "

" I spend almost every morning with mail. "

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

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

Seamus Heaney

Aesthetic

Sense

" One doesn't want one's identity coerced. "

Seamus Heaney

Want

Identity

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

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

" I think childhood is, generally speaking, a preparation for disappointment. "

" There's never going to be a united Ireland, you know. "

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

Seamus Heaney

Last

Order

" 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. "

" Yeats was 18th-century oratory, almost. "

" I always believed that whatever had to be written would somehow get itself written. "

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

" Poetry is always slightly mysterious, and you wonder what is your relationship to it. "

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

" I've nothing against the Queen personally. I had lunch at the Palace once upon a time. "

" I believe we are put here to improve civilisation. "

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

" 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 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. "

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

" 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. "

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