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

— Seamus Heaney

Since when," he asked,"Are the first line and last line of any poem Where the poem begins and ends?

— Seamus Heaney

Sink every impulse like a bolt. Secure The bastion of sensation. Do not waver Into language. Do not waver in it.

— Seamus Heaney

That was their way, their heathenish hope; deep in their hearts they remembered hell.

— Seamus Heaney

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

— Seamus Heaney

The experimental poetry thing is not my thing. It's a program of the avant-garde: basically a refusal of the kind of poetry I write.

— Seamus Heaney

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.

— Seamus Heaney

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.

— Seamus Heaney

The faking of feelings is a sin against the imagination.

— Seamus Heaney

The main thing is to write for the joy of it. Cultivate a work-lust that imagines its haven like your hands at night dreaming the sun in the sunspot of a breast. You are fasted now, light-headed, dangerous. Take off from here.

— Seamus Heaney