Quotes by Poets - Page 415

The task of the artist at any time is uncompromisingly simple — to discover what has not yet been done, and to do it.
Craig Raine
For me the experience of writing is really an experience of losing control.… I think it’s very much like dreaming or like surfing. You go out there and wait for a wave, and when it comes it takes you somewhere and you don’t know where it’ll go.
Margaret Atwood
I think part of my purpose in this life is to talk about magic, and to make it.
Theodora Goss
If we were to understand how important it is to say something and say it well, maybe we wouldn’t write a single word, but that would be tragic.
Dejan Stojanovic
Poetry is the wailing of a broken heart―the etched sorrows of despairing souls.  These artful words are an exclamation in rare colors expressed noiselessly on parchment.  Poetry is the unheard cry of a flower, wilting.  It is a humble, lucent tear shed with meaning.  It is the lovely portrayal of ugliness and the bitter edge of sweet.  Poetry speaks to the spirit by piercing understanding. It interprets all senseless truths―beauty, love, emotion―into sensible scrawl.  Poetry is vague affirmation and bewildering clarification. Like the most poignant of emotions, we understand the essence but cannot adequately do it verbal justice, crippled by inherently weak tongues.  A spiritual soothsayer, poetry is the closest thing to expression of feelings unutterable.
Richelle E. Goodrich
Because there are hundreds of different ways to say one thing, I, being a writer, songwriter, and poet, speak childishly and incoherently. In speech there is so much to decide in so little time.
Criss Jami
What I've learned about writing is that sometimes less is more, while often more is grander. And both are true.
Richelle E. Goodrich
You never know, of course, when you write a book what its fate will be. Sink out of sight, soar to the sun–who knows. I love this quote from Frances Mayes. It pretty much sums up the Great Unknown of book writing.
Frances Mayes
To write is your last resort when you've betrayed someone.
Jean Genet
A sense of mission lostin ink'sjagged outcrops.I was trying to tell myselfwhat I must have knownbeforein a formI wouldn't recognize at first.
Rae Armantrout
Because of the earth’s roundness, Genghis Khan, in the fever of possession and destruction, hastened his own overthrow by invading lands that he had already razed and conquered. Not only is it impossible to know from where we come, but also from whom we come: nothing in common, in any case, with those who pass for being the “authors of our days” – which days? Better to invent a genealogy based on pure whim and the leanings of our hearts, but what if they don’t agree?
André Breton
Pages and pages and pages with words all over the pages. My goodness, what fun. What fun to write whatever words occur.
Jonah Winter
Of course, they were other things too. Sometimes they were even everything all together, but not fame, which was rooted in delusion and lies, if not ambition. Also, fame was reductive. Everything that ended in fame and everything that issued from fame was inevitably diminished. Fame's message was unadorned. Fame and literature were irreconcilable enemies.
Roberto Bolaño
Writing engenders in us certain attitudes toward language. It encourages us to take words for granted. Writing has enabled us to store vast quantities of words indefinitely. This is advantageous on the one hand but dangerous on the other. The result is that we have developed a kind of false security where language is concerned, and our sensitivity to language has deteriorated. And we have become in proportion insensitive to silence.
N. Scott Momaday
This story was a story of our time. And a writer's attempts not to fathom his time amount but to sounding his mind in it.
Louis Zukofsky
This time it was the sentence opening the last part of a story I had worked on for months: a sentence as is often worked off paper first. The pace of narrative and interest in character do not readily help the writer's hand to set down a sentence of that order. For though characters must take things in their own stride – somewhere in his story the writer cannot hold back this sentence that judges them. He wants it unobtrusive to his pace and the characters that caused him to write. The difficulty is to judge without seeming to be there, with a finality in the words that will make them casual and part of the story itself, except perhaps to another age.
Louis Zukofsky
I would talk in iambic pentameter if it were easier.
Howard Nemerov
(2002) In Rome, month upon month, I struggled with how to structure the book about my father (He already had the water, he just had to discover jars). At one point I laid each chapter out on the terrazzo floor, eighty-three in all, arranged them like the map of an imaginary city. Some of the piles of paper, I imagined, were freestanding buildings, some were clustered into neighborhoods, and some were open space. On the outskirts, of course, were the tenements--abandoned, ramshackled. The spaces between the piles were the roads, the alleyways, the footpaths, the rivers. The bridges to other neighborhoods, the bridges out...In this way I could get a sense if one could find their way through the book, if the map I was creating made sense, if it was a place one would want to spend some time in. If one could wander there, if one could get lost.
Nick Flynn
No, she laughed." How on earth could that be done? If you try to laugh and say ‘No’ at the same time, it sounds like neighing — yet people are perpetually doing it in novels. If they did it in real life they would be locked up.
Hilaire Belloc
I will write one book that will change entire humankind if only you have enough guts to read my previous ones.
Santosh Kalwar
At first, when an idea, a poem, or the desire to write takes hold of you, work is a pleasure, a delight, and your enthusiasm knows no bounds. But later on you work with difficulty, doggedly, desperately. For once you have committed yourself to a particular work, inspiration changes its form and becomes an obsession, like a love-affair… which haunts you night and day! Once at grips with a work, we must master it completely before we can recover our idleness.
Natalie Clifford Barney
The act of writing, it seems to me, makes up a shelter, allows space to what would otherwise be hidden, crossed out, mutilated. Sometimes writing can work toward a reparation, making a sheltering space for the mind. Yet it feeds off ruptures, tears in what might otherwise seem a seamless, oppressive fabric.
Meena Alexander
I work hard, I work very hard. All the books at least 30 revisions.
Ha Jin
Human beings across every culture I know about require such stories, stories with cool winds and wood smoke. They speak to something deep within us, the capacity to conceptualize, objectify and find patterns, thereby to create the flow of events and perceptions that find perfect expression in fiction. We are built this way, we create stories by reflex, unstoppably. But this elegant system really works best when the elements of the emerging story, whether is is being written or being read, are taken as literal fact. Almost always, to respond to the particulars of the fantastic as if they were metaphorical or allegorical is to drain them of vitality.
Peter Straub
Fill your papers with the breathings of your heart.
William Wadsworth
Snooki is a bestselling author? Huh? What? I don't know if I should dumb down my book, shoot myself or find a publisher who'll settle for a rough draft written on a Pop-Tart and a coconut lotion handie..
Geoffrey Hill
Write against patterns. Go against the devils. Write what you never write. Lie. Validate what you don’t validate. Indulge what you don’t like. Wallow in it. Write the opposite of what you always write, think, speak. Do everything against the grain!
Deena Metzger
A person who publishes a book appears willfully in public eye with his pants down.
Edna St. Vincent Millay
But 'why then publish?' There are no rewardsOf fame or profit when the world grows weary.I ask in turn why do you play at cards?Why drink? Why read? To make some hour less dreary.It occupies me to turn back regardsOn what I've seen or pondered, sad or cheery,And what I write I cast upon the streamTo swim or sink. I have had at least my dream.
George Gordon Byron
The reality of a serious writer is a reality of many voices, some of them belonging to the writer, some of them belonging to the world of readers at large.
Aberjhani
(I) only write it now because I have grown to believe that there is no dangerous idea, which does not become less dangerous when written out in sincere and careful English. ("The Adoration of The Magi")
W.B. Yeats
If you're a writer, the answer to everything is yes.
Nikki Giovanni
Read a lot. But read as a writer, to see how other writers are doing it. And make your knowledge of literature in English as deep and broad as you can. In workshops, writers are often told to read what is being written now, but if that is all you read, you are limiting yourself. You need to get a good overall sense of English literary history, so you can write out of that knowledge.
Theodora Goss
The writer has no responsibility other than to jack off in bed alone and write a good page.
Charles Bukowski
It is said that you can't write without a reader. The opposite holds true as well; you can't read without a writer. But if as a single, creative person you are one in the same, then, well.....problem solved! Great writing is born from that which we personally long to read.
Richelle E. Goodrich
Accept criticism. If you do not offer your work for criticism and accept that criticism, meaning give it serious thought and attention, then you will never improve.
Theodora Goss
To be a well-favoured man is the gift of fortune but to write and read comes by nature.
William Shakespeare
Basically, that's why I wrote: to save my ass, to save my ass from the madhouse, from the streets, from myself.
Charles Bukowski
A good writer knew when not to write. Anybody could type. Not that I was a good typist also I couldn't spell and I didn't know grammar. But I knew when not to write. It was like fucking. You had to rest the godhead now and then.
Charles Bukowski
I wanted to write the most beautiful poem but that is impossible the world has written its own.
Dejan Stojanovic
To write good poems is the secret of brevity.
Dejan Stojanovic
What appears most disquieting to me in isolation is the dilemma of how to use time. There is either too much or too little of it; we either live inside painfully contracting horizons, or feel ourselves isolated in the vastness of space. I seem to have lived with the palm of my hand balanced on the tip of a knife, writing what in theory I would call the Preface to a Future Book. And the relation of time to creation should always appear like that, a ratio that describes the fullness of energy brought to a particular stage of one's life, so that each work is a preface to a stage at which one has still to arrive, the logical extension of which is death. I live for the blaze of metaphor that unites incongruities. The red wine-stain on my page is like an intoxicant to the dance of words. It is a little ritual I undertake, this sprinkling of wine-spots on paper.
Jeremy Reed
One night I dreamed of an angel: I walked into a huge, empty bar and saw him sitting in a corner with his elbows on the table and a cup of milky coffee in front of him. She’s the love of your life, he said, looking up at me, and the force of his gaze, the fire in his eyes, threw me right across the room. I started shouting, Waiter, waiter, then opened my eyes and escaped from that miserable dream. Other nights I didn’t dream of anyone, but I woke up in tears.
Roberto Bolaño
We are writing in the age of stylish minimalism that in truth has become even more cautious because of word processing. Nowadays, creative writing students are underwriting rather than overdoing it.
Stephen Kuusisto
The finder of his theme will be at no loss for words.
J.V. Cunningham
I know that no reader ever asks a question. A writer must force his favors upon his readers.
Jan Neruda
This, above all, ask yourself in the stillest hour of the night: must I write? Delve deep into yourself. And if this should be affirmative, if you may meet this question witha strong and simple 'I must' then build your lfie according to this necessity; your life even into its most indifferent and slightest hour must be a sign of this urge and a testimony to it.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Whoever has received knowledgeand eloquence in speech from Godshould not be silent or secretivebut demonstrate it willingly.When a great good is widely heard of,then, and only then, does it bloom,and when that good is praised by man,it has spread its blossoms.
Marie de France
Many of the characters are fools and they're always playing tricks on meand treating me badly.
Jorge Luis Borges
Good evening, Lord Corwin,' said the lean, cadaverous figure who rested against a storage rack, smoking his pipe, grinning around it.Good evening, Roger. How are things in the nether world?'A rat, a bat, a spider. Nothing much else astir. Peaceful.'You enjoy this duty?'He nodded.I am writing a philosophical romance shot through with elements of horror and morbidity. I work on those parts down here.
Roger Zelazny
The more the words of others impressed him with their factual content, the more he felt he must wait for his own facts before being tempted into words.
Louis Zukofsky
La plus grande chute est celle qu'on fait du haut de l'innocence.
Heiner Müller
Feel oddly barren. My sickness is when words draw in their horns and the physical world refuses to be ordered, recreated, arranged and selected. I am a victim of it then, not a master.
Sylvia Plath
V.S. Pritchett's definition of a short story is 'something glimpsed from the corner of the eye, in passing.' Notice the 'glimpse' part of this. First the glimpse. Then the glimpse gives life, turned into something that illuminates the moment and may, if we're lucky -- that word again -- have even further ranging consequences and meaning. The short story writer's task is to invest the glimpse with all that is in his power. He'll bring his intelligence and literary skill to bear (his talent), his sense of proportion and sense of the fitness of things: of how things out there really are and how he sees those things -- like no one else sees them. And this is done through the use of clear and specific language, language used so as to bring to life the details that will light up the story for the reader. For the details to be concrete and convey meaning, the language must be accurate and precisely given. The words can be so precise they may even sound flat, but they can still carry; if used right they can hit all the notes.
Raymond Carver
In the eyes of others a man is a poet if he has written one good poem. In his own he is only a poet at the moment when he is making his last revision to a new poem. The moment before, he was still only a potential poet; the moment after, he is a man who has ceased to write poetry, perhaps forever.
W.H. Auden
Everything is gestation and then bringing forth. To let each impression and each germ of feeling come to completion wholly in itself, in the dark, in the inexpressible, the unconscious, beyond the reach of one's own intelligence, and await with deep humility and patience the birth-hour of a new clarity: that alone is living the artist's life, in understanding and in creating. There is no measuring in time, no year matters, and ten years are nothing. Being an artist means, not reckoning and counting, but ripening like the tree which does not force its sap and stands confidence in the storms of spring without fear that after them may come no summer.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Write all the time. I believe in writing every day, at least a thousand words a day. We have a strange idea about writing: that it can be done, and done well, without a great deal of effort. Dancers practice every day, musicians practice every day, even when they are at the peak of their careers – especially then. Somehow, we don’t take writing as seriously. But writing – writing wonderfully – takes just as much dedication.
Theodora Goss
If you’re a writer, your first duty, a duty you owe to yourself and your readers, and to your writing itself, is to become wonderful. To become the best writer you can possibly be.
Theodora Goss
This manuscript of yours that has just come back from another editor is a precious package. Don't consider it rejected. Consider that you've addressed it 'to the editor who can appreciate my work' and it has simply come back stamped 'Not at this address'. Just keep looking for the right address.
Barbara Kingsolver
When I was young I was depressed all the time. But suicide no longer seemed a possibility in my life. At my age there was very little left to kill. It was good to be old, no matter what they said. It was reasonable that a man had to be at least 50 years old before he could write with anything like clarity.
Charles Bukowski