If poetry and the arts do anything, they can fortify your inner life, your inwardness.
Seamus HeaneyI might enjoy being an albatross, being able to glide for days and daydream for hundreds of miles along the thermals. And then being able to hang like an affliction round some people's necks.
Seamus HeaneyI've nothing against the Queen personally: I had lunch at the Palace once upon a time.
Seamus HeaneyI have always thought of poems as stepping stones in one's own sense of oneself. Every now and again, you write a poem that gives you self-respect and steadies your going a little bit farther out in the stream. At the same time, you have to conjure the next stepping stone because the stream, we hope, keeps flowing.
Seamus Heaney