Seamus Heaney

Poetry is more a threshold than a path.

Your temperament is what you write with, but it's also how you deal with the world.

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

I believe we are put here to improve civilisation.

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.

My father and mother had no sense of entitlement for their children.

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

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.

History says, 'Don't hope on this side of the grave.'

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

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

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

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.

Tom Sleigh's poetry is hard-earned and well founded. I great admire the way it refuses to cut emotional corners and yet achieves a sense of lyric absolution.

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

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

As a young poet, you need corroboration, and that's what publication does.

I've been in the habit of helping people.

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

The faking of feelings is a sin against the imagination.

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