Quotes About Expression

A poet is somebody who has written a poem.

Poetry ought to be a by-product of living, and you can't have a by-product unless you've got a product first .

We are strange creatures, and writers are stranger creatures than most.

The writers I admired and still admire were not carpenters, but more like sculptors. Their art was and is a real probing of real and troubling human confusions.

The creative writer is compulsively concrete . . . . His fictional house should be haunted by ideas, not inhabited by them; they should flit past the windows after dark, not fill the rooms. The moment anyone tries to make poems or stories of ideas alone he is at the edge of absurdity; he can only harangue, never interest and persuade, because ideas in their conceptual state are simply not dramatic. They have to be put into the form of people and actions . . .

How to write a story, though ignorant or baffled. You take something that is important to you, something you have brooded about. You try to see it as clearly as you can, and to fix it in a transferable equivalent. All you want in the finished print is the clean statement of the lens, which is yourself, on the subject that has been absorbing your attention. Sure, it's autobiography. Sure, it's fiction. Either way, if you have done it right, it's true.

That night she wrote a hasty sketch and showed it to Oliver. "It's all right," he said. "But I'd take out that stuff about Olympian mountains and the Stygian caverns of the mine. That's about used up, I should think.

A poem isn't selfish. It speaks to people.

Poems ought to reflect the work the poet does, and his relationships with other people, and family, and institutions, and organization.

There is something about all beards that is like the gesture of thumbing the nose. Thank you very much. Up yours.

Poetry ought to be a by-product of living, and you can't have a by-product unless you've had a product first. It's immoral not to get in and work and get your hands dirty.

maybe we were the diggers of literature

like the discomforts of a camping trip that become hilarious in the telling, the verbal formulation of distress has the capacity to cure it.

In fiction I think we should have no agenda except to try to be truthful. The shouters in thunder roar from their podiums and pulpits; I squeak from my corner.

Be open, be available, be exposed, be skinless. Skinless? Dance around in your bones.

Poetry is a search for the inexplicable.

The plum survives its poems.

Money is a kind of poetry.

The poet is priest of the invisible.

The essential thing in form is to be free in whatever form is used. A free form does not assure freedom. As a form, it is just one more form. So that it comes to this, I suppose, that I believe in freedom regardless of form.

The essential gaudiness of poetry.

Just as my fingers on these keysMake music, so the self-same soundsOn my spirit make a music, too.

In poetry, you must love the words, the ideas and the images and rhythms with all your capacity to love anything at all.

Poetry is the supreme fiction, madame.