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" 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

Related Quotes:

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

Seamus Heaney

People

Alive

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

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

Seamus Heaney

General

Literature

" 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. "

" The end of art is peace. "

" Poetry is more a threshold than a path. "

Seamus Heaney

Threshold

Poetry

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

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

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

" Poetry is a domestic art, most itself when most at home. "

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

" Write whatever you like! "

" 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. "

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

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

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

" 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. "

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

" I've been in the habit of helping people. "

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" I credit poetry for making this space-walk possible. "

" 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. "

" The murder of Sean Brown hurt my soul. "

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