Quotes by Poets - Page 418

Just tell the truth, and they'll accuse you of writing black humor.
Charles Willeford
I...have always known that my destiny was, above all, a literary destiny — that bad things and some good things would happen to me, but that, in the long run, all of it would be convertedinto words. Particularly the bad things, since happiness does not need to be transformed: happiness is its own end.
Jorge Luis Borges
This is no book. Whoever touches this touches a man.
Ezra Pound
A person who publishes a book willfully appears before the populace with his pants down. If it is a good book nothing can hurt him. If it is a bad book nothing can help him.
Edna St. Vincent Millay
He thought that the rose was to be found in its own eternity and not in his words; and that we may mention or allude to a thing, but not express it.
Jorge Luis Borges
Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy
Jack Kerouac
A real writer learns from earlier writers the way a boy learns from an apple orchard -- by stealing what he has a taste for, and can carry off
Archibald MacLeish
The main thing is to writefor the joy of it. Cultivate a work-lustthat imagines its haven like your hands at nightdreaming the sun in the sunspot of a breast.You are fasted now, light-headed, dangerous.Take off from here.
Seamus Heaney
Publishing a book is like stuffing a note into a bottle and hurling it into the sea. Some bottles drown, some come safe to land, where the notes are read and then possibly cherished, or else misinterpreted, or else understood all too well by those who hate the message. You never know who your readers might be.
Margaret Atwood
Writers don't write from experience, although many are hesitant to admit that they don't. ...If you wrote from experience, you'd get maybe one book, maybe three poems. Writers write from empathy.
Nikki Giovanni
I smell blood and an era of prominent madmen.
W.H. Auden
End with an image and don't explain.
Stanley Kunitz
Good writing works from a simple premise: your experience is not yours alone, but in some sense a metaphor for everyone's.
Dorianne Laux
Strong words outlast the paper they are written upon.
Joseph Bruchac
I feel more alive when I'm writing than I do at any other time--except maybe when I'm making love.
May Sarton
When I am writing, I am trying to find out who I am, who we are, what we're capable of, how we feel, how we lose and stand up, and go on from darkness into darkness. I'm trying for that. But I'm also trying for the language. I'm trying to see how it can really sound. I really love language. I love it for wate it does for us, how it allows us to explain the pain and the glory, the nuances and delicacies of our existence. And then it allows us to laugh, allows us to show wit. Real wit is shown in language. We need language.
Maya Angelou
I read the way a person might swim, to save his or her life. I wrote that way too.
Mary Oliver
When I write, I disturb. When I show a film, I disturb. When I exhibit my painting, I disturb, and I disturb if I don't. I have a knack for disturbing.
Jean Cocteau
Tell the story as if it were only of interest to the small circle of your characters, of which you may be one. There is no other way to put life into the story.
Horacio Quiroga
To write as if your life depended on it; to write across the chalkboard, putting up there in public the words you have dredged; sieved up in dreams, from behind screen memories, out of silence-- words you have dreaded and needed in order to know you exist.
Adrienne Rich
Keep reminding yourself that literature is one of the saddest roads that leads to everything.
André Breton
I stand in the mist and cry, thinking of myself standing in the mist and crying, and wondering if I will ever be able to use this experience in a book.
Erica Jong
First, I do not sit down at my desk to put into verse something that is already clear in my mind. If it were clear in my mind, I should have no incentive or need to write about it. We do not write in order to be understood; we write in order to understand.
Cecil Day-Lewis
In the ordinary jumble of my literary drawer, I sometimes find texts I wrote ten, fifteen, or even more years ago. And many of them seem to me written by a stranger: I simply do not recognize myself in them. There was a person who wrote them, and it was I. I experienced them, but it was in another life, from which I just woke up, as if from someone else's dream.
Fernando Pessoa
A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and many others; the pains and pleasures of his species must become his own. The great instrument of moral good is the imagination.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Nothing quite has reality for me till I write it all down--revising and embellishing as I go. I'm always waiting for things to be over so I can get home and commit them to paper.
Erica Jong
A word is not the same with one writer as it is with another. One tears it from his guts. The other pulls it out of his overcoat pocket.
Charles Péguy
I think all writing is a disease. You can't stop it.
William Carlos Williams
For any writer who wants to keep a journal, be alive to everything, not just to what you're feeling, but also to your pets, to flowers, to what you're reading.
May Sarton
Writing is really just a matter of writing a lot, writing consistently and having faith that you'll continue to get better and better. Sometimes, people think that if they don't display great talent and have some success right away, they won't succeed. But writing is about struggling through and learning and finding out what it is about writing itself that you really love.
Laura Kasischke
What I try to do is write. I may write for two weeks ‘the cat sat on the mat, that is that, not a rat,’.... And it might be just the most boring and awful stuff. But I try. When I’m writing, I write. And then it’s as if the muse is convinced that I’m serious and says, ‘Okay. Okay. I’ll come.
Maya Angelou
To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme.
Herman Melville
There's life for you. Spend the best years of your life studying penmanship and rhetoric and syntax and Beowulf and George Eliot, and then somebody steals your pencil.
Dorothy Parker
take a writer away from his typewriterand all you have leftisthe sicknesswhich started himtypingin thebeginning
Charles Bukowski
writing about a writer's block is better than not writing at all
Charles Bukowski
If it's fiction, then it better be true.
Sherman Alexie
Women writers make for rewarding (and efficient) lovers. They are clever liars to fathers and husbands; yet they never hold their tongues too long, nor keep ardent typing fingers still.
Roman Payne
She writes things with her movements that I for the life of me could never write with a pen.
Christopher Poindexter
It's hell writing and it's hell not writing. The only tolerable state is having just written.
Robert Hass
Making a decision to write was a lot like deciding to jump into a frozen lake.
Maya Angelou
As a child, I read because books–violent and not, blasphemous and not, terrifying and not–were the most loving and trustworthy things in my life. I read widely, and loved plenty of the classics so, yes, I recognized the domestic terrors faced by Louisa May Alcott’s March sisters. But I became the kid chased by werewolves, vampires, and evil clowns in Stephen King’s books. I read books about monsters and monstrous things, often written with monstrous language, because they taught me how to battle the real monsters in my life.And now I write books for teenagers because I vividly remember what it felt like to be a teen facing everyday and epic dangers. I don’t write to protect them. It’s far too late for that. I write to give them weapons–in the form of words and ideas-that will help them fight their monsters. I write in blood because I remember what it felt like to bleed.
Sherman Alexie
We are great writers on the same dreadful typewriter
Allen Ginsberg
Writing is a delicious agony.
Gwendolyn Brooks
nothing can save you except writing. it keeps the walls from failing.
Charles Bukowski
I want to be clear about this. If you wrote from experience, you'd get maybe one book, maybe three poems. Writers write from empathy.
Nikki Giovanni
Words bounce. Words, if you let them, will do what they want to do and what they have to do.
Anne Carson
It's impossible to say a thing exactly the way it was, because of what you say can never be exact, you always have to leave something out, there are too many parts, sides, crosscurrents, nuances; too many gestures, which could mean this or that, too many shapes which can never be fully described, too many flavors, in the air or on the tongue, half-colors, too many.
Margaret Atwood
When a poet digs himself into a hole, he doesn't climb out. He digs deeper, enjoys the scenery, and comes out the other side enlightened.
Criss Jami
A short story must have a single mood and every sentence must build towards it.
Edgar Allan Poe
Writing is something that you don't know how to do. You sit down and it's something that happens, or it may not happen. So, how can you teach anybody how to write? It's beyond me, because you yourself don't even know if you're going to be able to. I'm always worried, well, you know, every time I go upstairs with my wine bottle. Sometimes I'll sit at that typewriter for fifteen minutes, you know. I don't go up there to write. The typewriter's up there. If it doesn't start moving, I say, well this could be the night that I hit the dust.
Charles Bukowski
All stories are about wolves. All worth repeating, that is. Anything else is sentimental drivel.All of them?Sure, he says. Think about it. There's escaping from the wolves, fighting the wolves, capturing the wolves, taming the wolves. Being thrown to the wolves, or throwing others to the wolves so the wolves will eat them instead of you. Running with the wolf pack. Turning into a wolf. Best of all, turning into the head wolf. No other decent stories exist.
Margaret Atwood
That's all we have, finally, the words, and they had better be the right ones.
Raymond Carver
True alchemy lies in this formula: ‘Your memory and your senses are but the nourishment of your creative impulse’.
Arthur Rimbaud
unless the sun inside you is burning your gut, don't do it
Charles Bukowski
the writing of somemenis like a vast bridgethat carries youoverthe many thingsthat claw and tear.The Wine of Forever
Charles Bukowski
The person born with a talent they are meant to use will find their greatest happiness in using it.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Some editors are failed writers, but so are most writers.
T.S Eliot
What’s writing really about? It’s about trying to take fuller possession of the reality of your life.
Ted Hughes
The nutritionist said I should eat root vegetables.Said if I could get down thirteen turnips a dayI would be grounded, rooted.Said my head would not keep flying awayto where the darkness lives.The psychic told me my heart carries too much weight.Said for twenty dollars she’d tell me what to do.I handed her the twenty. She said, “Stop worrying, darling.You will find a good man soon.”The first psycho therapist told me to spendthree hours each day sitting in a dark closetwith my eyes closed and ears plugged.I tried it once but couldn’t stop thinkingabout how gay it was to be sitting in the closet.The yogi told me to stretch everything but the truth.Said to focus on the out breath. Said everyone finds happinesswhen they care more about what they givethan what they get.The pharmacist said, “Lexapro, Lamicatl, Lithium, Xanax.”The doctor said an anti-psychotic might help meforget what the trauma said.The trauma said, “Don’t write these poems.Nobody wants to hear you cryabout the grief inside your bones.”But my bones said, “Tyler Clementi jumpedfrom the George Washington Bridgeinto the Hudson River convincedhe was entirely alone.”My bones said, “Write the poems.
Andrea Gibson
If the word doesn't exist, invent it; but first be sure it doesn't exist.
Charles Baudelaire