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" The problem as you get older... is that you become more self-aware. At the same time, you have to surprise yourself. There's no way of arranging the surprise, so it is tricky. "
Seamus Heaney
Problem
Yourself
You
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" 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 new possibilities would have to be based. "
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" We go to poetry, we go to literature in general, to be forwarded within ourselves. "
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" 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. "
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" 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 don't exchange many pleasantries. "
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" 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. "
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" At home in Ireland, there's a habit of avoidance, an ironical attitude towards the authority figure. "
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" You can have Irish identity in the north and also have your Irish passport. "
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" I'm very conscious that people dear to me are alive in my imagination - poets in particular. "
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" Your temperament is what you write with, but it's also how you deal with the world. "
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" To encounter 'Beowulf' is like taking a sledgehammer to a quarry face. You must bang in there. "
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" In my early teens, I acquired a kind of representative status: went on behalf of the family to wakes and funerals and so on. And I would be counted on as an adult contributor when it came to farm work - the hay in the summertime, for example. "
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" I feel myself part of something. Not only being part of a community but part of an actual moment and a movement of Irish writing and art. That sense of being part of the whole thing is the deepest joy. "
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