Seamus Heaney Quotes

The gift of writing is to be self-forgetful... to get a surge of inner life or inner supply or unexpected sense of empowerment, to be afloat, to be out of yourself.

Seamus Heaney

• Writing
• Unexpected
• Empowerment
• Forgetful

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Quotes to Explore

• When I was around eight, I learned how to touch-type at school, and I received a computer as a present. I started writing plays, and for many years I thought I would be a playwright.

  

  Gabrielle Zevin
  • Writing
  • School
  • Present

• Yeah I'm still writing. I've got about 14 tracks now. But we've been on tour so we haven't had time to get back to a rehearsal place.

  

  Ville Valo HIM
  • Time
  • Writing
  • Now

• The beauty of 'The Hunger Games' and also 'Game of Thrones,' in fairness, both projects have really complex, three-dimensional, contradictory, strong women... The writing of female characters is extraordinary and equal to the men.

  

  Natalie Dormer
  • Men
  • Writing
  • Women

• All autobiography is storytelling; all writing is autobiography.

  

  J. M. Coetzee
  • Writing
  • Storytelling

• Sometimes things in life take a few years to digest, and they find their way into the work later on. Sometimes I'm writing about things from eight years ago-they just took a long time to distill and come out in the appropriate way.

  

  Beck
  • Life
  • Time
  • Work

• I am just doing photo shoots. It's not something that extraordinary. I'm not a great artist, I'm not writing books, I'm not a painter, and people in the streets ask me for a picture or a note, and I say, 'Why?'

  

  Carine Roitfeld
  • People
  • Great
  • Writing

• I don't talk about Amy Winehouse as a 'singer.' She's a pioneer. I listened to her endlessly when I started writing.

  

  Laura Mvula
  • Writing
  • Talk
  • Singer

• Then about 1951 I began writing again, painfully, a novel I called in the beginning A Life Sentence on Earth, but which developed into The Tree of Man.

  

  Patrick White
  • Life
  • Writing
  • Man

• My highest point was the first thing I won, a short story competition in a women's magazine in the Eighties. It was the first time I'd had my writing validated, and the first thing I'd ever shown anyone else.

  

  Kate Atkinson
  • Time
  • Writing
  • Women

• I've been writing for a long time. I sat down to write my first novel in the middle of March of 1982.

  

  J. A. Jance
  • Time
  • Long
  • Writing

• The ego being shattered is not what frightens me - that can be useful for writing - but the ego being inflated is sort of like it dying of gout.

  

  Garth Risk Hallberg
  • Writing
  • Dying
  • Ego

• Personal relationships are usually my biggest inspirations for writing my songs. The best way for me to write a song is to visualise the story in my head, and I start humming a melody, and before you know it, a song is born.

  

  Nadia Ali
  • Writing
  • Song
  • Best

• The thing that makes writing so difficult is you don't have the element of serendipity. At least with a photograph, you can set up the camera, and something might happen. You might be a lousy photographer, but you can get a good picture if you just take enough of them.

  

  Sally Mann
  • Up
  • Good
  • Writing

• We all need to focus on our writing. Because the millions of readers out there don't care about your blog.

  

  J. A. Konrath
  • Writing
  • Focus
  • Care

• Good writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader - not the fact that it is raining, but the feeling of being rained upon.

  

  E. L. Doctorow
  • Good
  • Writing
  • Feeling

• Writing a novel is a terrible experience, during which the hair often falls out and the teeth decay.

  

  Flannery O'Connor
  • Writing
  • Experience
  • Hair

• Writing for me is quite a plastic form, a kind of mental sculpture, although that sounds weird. It acquires its character and its depth as it goes along.

  

  Kate Atkinson
  • Writing
  • Character
  • Weird

• I'm a writer who simply can't know what I'm writing about until the writing lets me discover it. In a sense, my writing process embraces the gapped nature of my memory process, leaping across spaces that represent all I've lost and establishing fresh patterns within all that remains.

  

  Floyd Skloot
  • Writing
  • Nature
  • Lost

• It is not about writing those hits again. I am sure I could write them, but it is about the sensibilities.

  

  Alison Moyet
  • Writing

• You find yourself in this place where you really get to find out what you're made of, and what I found was that when I was at my time of greatest need, there were people who appeared in my life, and helped me through it.

  

  Kathy Mattea
  • People
  • Life
  • Time

• I could displace the mystery of my speech onto writing, the latter perhaps recharging the former.

  

  Ben Lerner
  • Writing
  • Mystery
  • Speech

• I know what not being able to pay your bills feels like real well... I know that way better than a room full of beautiful people and Tony awards and Grammy awards.

  

  Leslie Odom, Jr.
  • People
  • Real
  • Beautiful

• My job is to put on a great performance. Every time I step in the ring, my job is to perform at top level and to give the people, give the crowd, give the audience what they came to see and that is a good show and, of course, everybody wants to see knockouts and that's what I like to do.

  

  Anthony Macias
  • Job
  • Show
  • Ring

• The gift of writing is to be self-forgetful... to get a surge of inner life or inner supply or unexpected sense of empowerment, to be afloat, to be out of yourself.

  

  Seamus Heaney
  • Writing
  • Unexpected
  • Empowerment