Seamus Heaney Quotes

I Am Not A Playwright. A Playwright Would Take "antigone" And Hit It A Few Clouts And Knock It Out Of Shape And Restructure It. My Versioning Was Strictly Verbal.

Irish Readers, British Readers, American Readers: Is It Odd That I Haven't A Clue About How Differently They React? Or Better Say, I Cannot Find The Words To Describe My Hunch About Them.

The Bogholes Might Be Atlantic Seepage. The Wet Centre Is Bottomless.

Harvard Meant A Lot In My Writing Life From The Beginning, Even Though I Didnt Actually Do Much Composition On The Spot.

Hope For A Great Sea-change Timid To Rebuke And Too Petty To Forgive.

The Appointment [in Harvard] Gave Me Economic Safety, Writerly Support, And Intellectual Self-respectplus Eight Months To Myself Every Year.

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.

The Ireland I Now Inhabit Is One That These Irish Contemporaries Have Helped To Imagine.

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.

My Body Was Braille For The Creeping Influences.

A Public Expectation, It Has To Be Said, Not Of Poetry As Such But Of Political Positions Variously Approvable By Mutually Disapproving Groups.

I Shall Gain Glory Or Die.