Seamus Heaney

"Between my finger and my thumb the squat pen rests; snug as a gun."

"Whatever is given can be taken away."

"The main thing is to get the mood right."

"Happiness, I have discovered, is nearly always a rebound from hard work."

"Be advised my passport's green. No glass of ours was ever raised to toast The Queen."

"Human beings suffer, they torture one another, they get tenderness mixed up with brutality."

"I rhyme to see myself, to set the darkness echoing."

"Bogland is the wet centre that grew the country."

"We cannot light candles in the sun."

"Anything can be said in a poem."

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

"I feel it in my bones that something is owed to the place we come from."

"The usual clarity of the deeply observed is missing."

"I want to be a good poet but a better man."

"Time is the rider that breaks youth."

"You can never take your native place out of yourself."

"All poetry, I would say, is political in the sense that it is serves justice."

"Language is power and poetry is one of the most powerful uses of language."

"The nape of the neck holds a lovely syntax."

"Feeling the power of the whole community behind you."

"The pen is a kind of sword."

"Words are sacred things in poetry."

"We are language, we are everything."

"Freedoms are not given, they are taken."

"The actual effect of any individual poem is just the tip of an iceberg."

"I write for freedom, not for fashion."

"Beauty and violence in the same package."

"Art has to be ahead of life."

"The main thing in making poetry is to make good words."

"Every writer is a liar but lies create truth."