“The main thing is to write
for the joy of it. Cultivate a work-lust
that imagines its haven like your hands at night
dreaming the sun in the sunspot of a breast.
You are fasted now, light-headed, dangerous.
Take off from here.”
Source: Station Island
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Seamus Heaney 29
Irish poet, playwright, translator, lecturer 1939–2013Related quotes
Source At the Jazz Corner of the World, Blue Note, 1959.

Source: Posthumous publications, Portrait of Manet by himself and his contemporaries (1960), p. 98.

By Still Waters (1906)

“The time for work is while the sun's light shines,
but every living thing finds peace at night.”
Tempo è da travagliar mentre il sol dura;
Ma nella notte ogni animale ha pace.
Canto VI, stanza 52 (tr. Wickert)
Gerusalemme Liberata (1581)

On Writing Poetry (1995)
Context: It's a feature of our age that if you write a work of fiction, everyone assumes that the people and events in it are disguised biography — but if you write your biography, it's equally assumed you're lying your head off. This last may be true, at any rate of poets: Plato said that poets should be excluded from the ideal republic because they are such liars. I am a poet, and I affirm that this is true. About no subject are poets tempted to lie so much as about their own lives; I know one of them who has floated at least five versions of his autobiography, none of them true. I of course — being also a novelist — am a much more truthful person than that. But since poets lie, how can you believe me?

Source: A Joseph Campbell Companion: Reflections on the Art of Living

Spoken at the end of the Wesley Willis Live EP.

“A word only writes its night and rides its dream.”
”A Word,” p. 81
Circling: 1978-1987 (1993), Sequence: “Darkness Is Waiting”