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" 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 stress. "

Seamus Heaney

True

Work

Done

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

" 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 and thence to university. "

Seamus Heaney

Generation

Important

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

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

" Poetry is what we do to break bread with the dead. "

" I suppose you inevitably fall into habits of expression. "

" 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, or help anything else to grow unless you find a way to reach it and touch it. "

" 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 Nobel Foundation. "

" Eternal life can mean utter reverence for life itself. "

" We go to poetry, we go to literature in general, to be forwarded within ourselves. "

Seamus Heaney

General

Literature

" 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. "

Seamus Heaney

Climb

Big

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

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

" You can have Irish identity in the north and also have your Irish passport. "

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

" 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. "

Seamus Heaney

Writer

Who

" Your temperament is what you write with, but it's also how you deal with the world. "

" 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 was aware of it, nothing much was said about it. "

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

Seamus Heaney

Want

Identity

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

" The poet is on the side of undeceiving the world. "

" It's difficult to learn poems off by heart that don't rhyme. "

" I'm very conscious that people dear to me are alive in my imagination - poets in particular. "

Seamus Heaney

People

Alive

" I came from a farming background, and my career was teaching. "

" Memory has always been fundamental for me. In fact, remembering what I had forgotten is the way most of the poems get started. "

" 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 otiose and superfluous to them. "

" I'm a firm believer in learning by heart. "

" What I've said before, only half in joke, is that everybody in Ireland is famous. Or, maybe better, say everybody is familiar. "

" The faking of feelings is a sin against the imagination. "

" The end of art is peace. "