Seamus Heaney Quotes & Sayings (Page 4)

“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.”

“Nowadays, what an award gives is a sense of solidarity with the poetry guild, as it were: sustenance coming from the assent of your peers on the judging panel.”

“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.”

“Sonnet is about movement in a form.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Write whatever you like!”

“I credit poetry for making this space-walk possible.”

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

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