Quotes by Seamus Heaney

"I'm not personally obsessed with death. At a certain age, the light that you live in is inhabited by the shades - it 'tis."

"In a war situation or where violence and injustice are prevalent, poetry is called upon to be something more than a thing of beauty."

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

"I have begun to think of life as a series of ripples widening out from an original center."

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

"The fact of the matter is that the most unexpected and miraculous thing in my life was the arrival in it of poetry itself - as a vocation and an elevation almost."

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

"Poetry is more a threshold than a path."

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

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

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

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

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

"Whether it be a matter of personal relations within a marriage or political initiatives within a peace process, there is no sure-fire do-it-yourself kit."

"The end of art is peace."

"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."

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

"In Northern Ireland, helicopters are not usually used to promote poetry."

"The experiment of poetry, as far as I am concerned, happens when the poem carries you beyond where you could have reasonably expected to go."

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

"The completely solitary self: that's where poetry comes from, and it gets isolated by crisis, and those crises are often very intimate also."

"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."

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

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

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

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