Quotes About Expression

A life is not sufficiently elevated for poetry, unless, of course, the life has been made into an art.

I returned to poetry as a more precise way to describe the world, more precise than science.

As far as I know Misha wrote the first cyberpunk poetry.

The poet speaks to all men of that other life of theirs that they have smothered and forgotten.

Poetry is my politics. It's an opportunity that gives me a way to speak.

What will they say about my poetry who never touched my blood?

If you want to change the world's spirit, I will suggest that only poetry can do this.

Poetry lies at the centre of the literary experience because it is the form that most clearly asserts the specificity of literature.

In writing poetry, all of one's attention is focused on some inner voice.

Poetry has no investment in anything besides openness. It's not arguing a point. It's creating an environment.

Poetry depends on being simultaneously opaque and transparent. It can't be only one or the other. The pebble and the pool.

Every healthy man can do without food for two days — but without poetry, never!

The novel is born of disillusionment; the poem, of despair.

Poetry is what makes the invisible appear.

The poet is the one who breaks through our habits.

La poe sie veutquelque chose d'e norme, debarbare et de sauvage. Poetry needs something on the scale of the grand, the barbarous, the savage.

The poet doesn't invent. He listens.

Was not writing poetry a secret transaction, a voice answering a voice?

The fear of poetry is an indication that we are cut off from our own reality.

A writer is not so much someone who has something to say as he is someone who has found a process that will bring about new things he would not have thought of if he had not started to say them.

Poetry is an orphan of silence.

All good poetry is forged slowly and patiently, link by link, with sweat and blood and tears.

I didn't write my poems because I wanted to, they were wrung from me. I had to write them.

I have always disliked the idea of an arts ghetto in which poetry is kept on a life-support system.