Seamus Heaney

The group of writers I had grown up with in the '60s - Derek Mahon, Michael Longley, James Simmons, John Hewitt, Paul Muldoon - formed a very necessary and self-sustaining group.

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

Eternal life can mean utter reverence for life itself.

My language and my sensibility are yearning to admit a kind of religious or transcendent dimension. But then there's the reality: there's no Heaven, no afterlife of the sort we were promised, and no personal God.

My point is there's a hidden Scotland in anyone who speaks the Northern Ireland speech. It's a terrific complicating factor, not just in Northern Ireland, but Ireland generally.

I suppose you inevitably fall into habits of expression.

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

The kind of poet who founds and reconstitutes values is somebody like Yeats or Whitman - these are public value-founders.

My experience is that prose usually equals duty - last minute, overdue-deadline stuff or a panic lecture to be written.

If you go into an underground train in London - probably anywhere, but chiefly in London - there's that sense of almost entering a ghostly dimension. People are very still and quiet; they don't exchange many pleasantries.

At home in Ireland, there's a habit of avoidance, an ironical attitude towards the authority figure.

I spend almost every morning with mail.

Yeats was 18th-century oratory, almost.

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.

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

In the United States, in poetry workshops, it's now quite a thing to make graduate students learn poems by heart.

Write whatever you like!

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.

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.

I've nothing against the Queen personally. I had lunch at the Palace once upon a time.