Top 102 Quotes by Seamus Heaney

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

The poet is on the side of undeceiving the world.

Then as the years went on and my listening became more deliberate, I would climb up on an arm of our big sofa to get my ear closer to the wireless speaker.

I suppose you could say my father's world was Thomas Hardy and my mother's D.H. Lawrence.

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.

To encounter 'Beowulf' is like taking a sledgehammer to a quarry face. You must bang in there.

My passport's green.

I always had a superstitious fear of setting up a too well-designed writing place and then finding that the writing had absconded.

Dylan Thomas is now as much a case history as a chapter in the history of poetry.

Memory has always been fundamental for me. In fact, remembering what I had forgotten is the way most of the poems get started.