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

• 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

• 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

• 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

• One thing I've had to realize in my career is that I can't do it all. Sometimes we put a lot of pressure on ourselves to make sure we're writing the next hit. There are other people out there, and that's what they do every day, and they have strengths that I don't have.

  

  Randy Houser
  • People
  • Writing
  • Career

• The tough thing about writing is you go into a room alone, you close the door and you do your work.

  

  Randy Wayne White
  • Work
  • Writing
  • Alone

• When I was in college at Carnegie Mellon, I wanted to be a chemist. So I became one. I worked in a laboratory and went to graduate school at the University of Pittsburgh. Then I taught science at a private girls' school. I had three children and waited until all three were in school before I started writing.

  

  E. L. Konigsburg
  • Writing
  • Children
  • School

• I think I write more outspoken than the average rapper.

  

  Keith Matthew Thornton
  • Thinking
  • Writing
  • Average

• If we become increasingly humble about how little we know, we may be more eager to search.

  

  John Templeton
  • May
  • Search
  • Humble

• There's nothing like walking onto a Hollywood sound stage.

  

  Richard Jenkins
  • Walking
  • Stage
  • Hollywood

• 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