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."

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

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

"As writers and readers, as sinners and citizens, our realism and our aesthetic sense make us wary of crediting the positive note."

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

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

"I spend almost every morning with mail."

"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."

"I'm a firm believer in learning by heart."

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

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

"In my early teens, I acquired a kind of representative status: went on behalf of the family to wakes and funerals and so on. And I would be counted on as an adult contributor when it came to farm work - the hay in the summertime, for example."

"In poetry, everything can be faked but the intensity of utterance."

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

"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."

"Poetry is more a threshold than a path."

"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 end of art is peace."

"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."

"What I've said before, only half in joke, is that everybody in Ireland is famous. Or, maybe better, say everybody is familiar."

"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."