Quotes by Poets - Page 417

Man, wow, there's so many things to do, so many things to write! How to even begin to get it all down and without modified restraints and all hung-up on like literary inhibitions and grammatical fears...
Jack Kerouac
My circumstances of unrelieved responsibility and permanent distraction necessitated the short story form.
Raymond Carver
Apollinaire said a poet should be 'of his time.' I say objects of the Digital Age belong in newspapers, not literature. When I read a novel, I don’t want credit cards; I want cash in ducats and gold doubloons.
Roman Payne
And the good writer chooses his words for their 'meaning', but that meaning is not a a set, cut-off thing like the move of knight or pawn on a chess-board. It comes up with roots, with associations, with how and where the word is familiarly used, or where it has been used brilliantly or memorably.
Ezra Pound
To say! To know how to say! To know how to exist via the written voice and the intellectual image! This is all that matters in life; the rest is men and women, imagined loves and factitious vanities, the wiles of our digestion and forgetfulness, people squirming — like worms when a rock is lifted — under the huge abstract boulder of the meaningless blue sky.
Fernando Pessoa
Imagination runs through the places where we live like water. We need both things-a living knowledge of the land and a live imagination of it and our place in it- if we are going to preserve it.
Robert Hass
The act of writing itself is much like the construction of a mirror made of words. Looking at certain illuminated corners of or cracks within the mirror, the author can see fragments of an objective reality that comprise the physical universe, social communities, political dynamics, and other facets of human existence. Looking in certain other corners of the same mirror, he or she may experience glimpses of a True Self sheltered deftly behind a mask of public proprieties.
Aberjhani
You don't know what love is until someone lives with you while you write a book.
Thulani Davis
There is only one way: Go within. Search for the cause, find the impetus that bids you write. Put it to this test: Does it stretch out its roots in the deepest place of your heart? Can you avow that you would die if you were forbidden to write? Above all, in the most silent hour of your night, ask yourself this: Must I write? Dig deep into yourself for a true answer. And if it should ring its assent, if you can confidently meet this serious question with a simple, “I must,” then build your life upon it. It has become your necessity. Your life, in even the most mundane and least significant hour, must become a sign, a testimony to this urge.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Nature fits all her children with something to do, he who would write and can't write, can surely review.
James Russell Lowell
not writing is not good but trying to write when you can't is worse.
Charles Bukowski
All you have to do is put one word after another, and remember how great it feels to be a writer.
Stephanie Lennox
I'm not a big fan of inspiration. I'm too old to sit and wait for the muse to give me a little kiss... I write a lot, and I'm not afraid to make mistakes or to write badly. I can alsways fix something weak and dull. But I can't fix a blank page.
Ron Koertge
Lear, Macbeth. Mercutio – they live on their own as it were. The newspapers are full of them, if we were only the Shakespeares to see it. Have you ever been in a Police Court? Have you ever watched tradesmen behind their counters? My soul, the secrets walking in the streets! You jostle them at every corner. There's a Polonius in every first-class railway carriage, and as many Juliets as there are boarding-schools. ... How inexhaustibly rich everything is, if you only stick to life.
Walter de la Mare
In my craft or sullen artExercised in the still nightWhen only the moon ragesAnd the lovers lie abedWith all their griefs in their arms,I labour by singing lightNot for ambition or breadOr the strut and trade of charmsOn the ivory stagesBut for the common wagesOf their most secret heart.Not for the proud man apartFrom the raging moon I writeOn these spindrift pagesNor for the towering deadWith their nightingales and psalmsBut for the lovers, their armsRound the griefs of the ages,Who pay no praise or wagesNor heed my craft or art.
Dylan Thomas
I'm a drinker with writing problems.
Brendan Behan
The real writer is one who really writes. Talent is an invention like phlogiston after the fact of fire. Work is its own cure. You have to like it better than being loved.
Marge Piercy
A Chinese poet many centuries ago noticed that to re-create something in words is like being alive twice.
Frances Mayes
Write as the wind blows and command all words like an army!
Hilaire Belloc
One day I wrote her name upon the strand,But came the waves and washèd it away:Again I wrote it with a second hand,But came the tide, and made my pains his prey.
Edmund Spenser
If language is lost, humanity is lost. If writing is lost, certain kinds of civilization and society are lost, but many other kinds remain - and there is no reason to think that those alternatives are inferior.
Robert Bringhurst
A writer always begins by being too complicated—he’s playing at several games at once.
Jorge Luis Borges
WIDE, the margin between carte blanche and the white page. Nevertheless it is not in the margin that you can find me, but in the yet whiter one that separates the word-strewn sheet from the transparent, the written page from the one to be written in the infinite space where the eye turns back to the eye, and the hand to the pen, where all we write is erased, even as you write it. For the book imperceptibly takes shape within the book we will never finish.There is my desert.
Edmond Jabès
Who dreamt and made incarnate gaps in Time & Spacethrough images juxtaposed, and trapped the archangel of the soul between 2 visual images and joined the elemental verbs and set the noun and dash of consciousness together jumping with sensation of Pater Omnipotens Aeterna Deus to recreate the syntax and measure of poor human prose and stand before you speechless and intelligent and shaking with shame
Allen Ginsberg
He possessed the logic of all good intentions and a knowledge of all the tricks of his trade, and yet he never succeeded at anything, because he believed too much in the impossible. Surprising? Why so? He was forever in the act of conceiving it!
Charles Baudelaire
Follow the path of your aroused thought, and you will soon meet this infernal inscription: There is nothing so beautiful as that which does not exist.
Paul Valéry
You write for the people in high school who ignored you. We all do.
Carolyn Kizer
Only half the story is true. The rest is necessary.
John Yau
It takes a heap of loafing to write a book.
Gertrude Stein
Everyone thinks writers must know more about the inside of the human head, but that's wrong. They know less, that's why they write. Trying to find out what everyone else takes for granted.
Margaret Atwood
What is your advice to young writers?""Drink, fuck and smoke plenty of cigarettes.""What is your advice to older writers?""If you're still alive, you don't need any advice.""What is the impulse that makes you create a poem?""What makes you take a shit?
Charles Bukowski
Who is better off? The one who writes to revel in the voluptuousness of the life that surrounds them? Or the one who writes to escape the tediousness of that which awaits them outside? Whose flame will last longer?
Roman Payne
A word is a bud attempting to become a twig. How can one not dream while writing? It is the pen which dreams. The blank page gives the right to dream.
Gaston Bachelard
When you write, you can hide behind your words. When you talk, you are up front, like the clown in the midway booth; and passersby can bean you with a ball.
Willard R. Espy
It's possible, in a poem or a short story, to write about commonplace things and objects using commonplace but precise language, and to endow those things-- a chair, a window curtain, a fork, a stone, a woman's earring-- with immense, even startling power. It is possible to write a line of seemingly innocuous dialogue and have it send a chill along the reader's spine-- the source of artistic delight, as Nabokov would have it. That's the kind of writing that most interests me.
Raymond Carver
Write in the morning, revise in the afternoon, read at night, and spend the rest of your time exercising your diplomacy, stealth, and charm.
Roberto Bolaño
A scene should be selected by the writer for haunted-ness-of-mind interest. If you're not haunted by something, as by a dream, a vision, or a memory, which are involuntary, you're not interested or even involved.
Jack Kerouac
Writing and reading are the only ways to find your voice. It won't magically burst forth in your poems the next time you sit down to write, or the next; but little by little, as you become aware of more choices and begin to make them -- consciously and unconsciously -- your style will develop.
Dorianne Laux
A blind lover, don't knowwhat I love till I write it out
Michael Ondaatje
If you want to concentrate deeply on some problem, and especially some piece of writing or paper-work, you should acquire a cat. Alone with the cat in the room where you work ... the cat will invariably get up on your desk and settle placidly under the desk lamp ... The cat will settle down and be serene, with a serenity that passes all understanding. And the tranquility of the cat will gradually come to affect you, sitting there at your desk, so that all the excitable qualities that impede your concentration compose themselves and give your mind back the self-command it has lost. You need not watch the cat all the time. Its presence alone is enough. The effect of a cat on your concentration is remarkable, very mysterious.
Muriel Spark
If you dedicate your attention to discipline in your life you become smarter while you are writing than while you are hanging out with your pals or in any other line of work.
Russell Banks
Good writing takes place at intersections, at what you might call knots, at places where the society is snarled or knotted up.
Margaret Atwood
People who understand everything get no stories.
Bertolt Brecht
If you don't write when you don't have time for it, you won't write when you do have time for it.
Katerina Stoykova-Klemer
Real writers are those who want to write, need to write, have to write.
Robert Penn Warren
When I am dead, I hope it may be said, 'His sins were scarlet, but his books were read.
Hilaire Belloc
When I started writingI was a sick teenagedfuck inside who partlythought I was the newMarquis de Sade, a bodydoomed to communicatewith Satan who was us-ing my sickness as hishome away from home,and there’s your proof.
Dennis Cooper
If you want to get rich from writing, write the sort of thing that's read by persons who move their lips when they're reading to themselves.
Don Marquis
Who’s to say what a ‘literary life’ is? As long as you are writing often, and writing well, you don’t need to be hanging-out in libraries all the time. Nightclubs are great literary research centers. So is Ibiza!
Roman Payne
I speak to the Black experience, but I am always talking about the human condition--about what we can endure, dream, fail at and survive.
Maya Angelou
Romanticism is the abuse of adjectives
Alfred de Musset
Anyone who is going to be a writer knows enough at fifteen to write several novels.
May Sarton
Ivanov's fear was of a literary nature. That is, it was the fear that afflicts most citizens who, one fine (or dark) day, choose to make the practice of writing, and especially the practice of fiction writing, an integral part of their lives. Fear of being no good. Also fear of being overlooked. But above all, fear of being no good. Fear that one's efforts and striving will come to nothing. Fear of the step that leaves no trace. Fear of the forces of chance and nature that wipe away shallow prints. Fear of dining alone and unnoticed. Fear of going unrecognized. Fear of failure and making a spectacle of oneself. But above all, fear of being no good. Fear of forever dwelling in the hell of bad writers.
Roberto Bolaño
if you think they didn't go crazy in tiny rooms just like you're doing now without women without food without hope then you're not ready.
Charles Bukowski
There is only one place to write and that is alone at a typewriter. The writer who has to go into the streets is a writer who does not know the streets. . . when you leave your typewriter you leave your machine gun and the rats come pouring through.
Charles Bukowski
He chose The Metamorphosis over The Trial, he chose Bartleby over Moby-Dick, he chose A Simple Heart over Bouvard and Pecuchet, and A Christmas Carol over A Tale of Two Cities or The Pickwick Papers. What a sad paradox, thought Amalfitano. Now even bookish pharmacists are afraid to take on the great, imperfect, torrential works, books that blaze paths into the unknown. They choose the perfect exercises of the great masters. Or what amounts to the same thing: they want to watch the great masters spar, but they have no interest in real combat, when the great masters struggle against that something, that something that terrifies us all, that something that cows us and spurs us on, amid blood and mortal wounds and stench.
Roberto Bolaño
Occasionally, there arises a writing situation where you see an alternative to what you are doing, a mad, wild gamble of a way for handling something, which may leave you looking stupid, ridiculous or brilliant -you just don't know which. You can play it safe there, too, and proceed along the route you'd mapped out for yourself. Or you can trust your personal demon who delivered that crazy idea in the first place.Trust your demon.
Roger Zelazny
I learned to write by reading the kind of books I wished I'd written.
Barbara Kingsolver
The joy of writing.The power of preserving.Revenge of a mortal hand.
Wisława Szymborska
I am a writer perhaps because I am not a talker.
Gwendolyn Brooks