Quotes About Expression

Loud songs do not a patriot make.

No wonder Van Gogh cut his ear off, I thought; there's nothing else to do in a place like this but cut your ear off.

It becomes still more difficult to find Words at once true and kind, Or not untrue and not unkind.

The poetic impulse is distinct from ideas about things or feelings about things, though it may use these. It's more like a desire to separate a piece of one's experience & set it up on its own, an isolated object never to trouble you again, at least not for a bit. In the absence of this impulse nothing stirs.

books are a load of crap

In life, as in art, talking vitiates doing.

Empty-page staring again tonight. It's maddening. I suppose people who don't write (like the Connollies) imagine anything that can be though can be expressed. Well, I don't know. I can't do it. It's this sort of thing that makes me belittle the whole business: what's the good of a 'talent' if you can't do it when you want to? What should we think of a woodcarver who couldn't woodcarver? or a pianist who couldn't play the piano? Bah, likewise grrr.

I think that at the bottom of all art lies the impulse to preserve.

Often one spends weeks trying to write a poem out of the conscious mind that never comes to anything - these are sort of 'ideal' poems that one feels ought to be written, but don't because (I fancy) they lack the vital spark of self-interest. A 'real' poem is a pleasure to write.

Poetry is emotional in nature and theatrical in operation.

A very crude difference between novels and poetry is that novels are about other people and poetry is about yourself.

What one writes is based so much on the kind of person one is, the kind of environment one has had and has now. One doesn't really choose the poetry one writes, one writes the kind of poetry one has to write, or one can write.

The sight of the money depressed her, because in such small familiar things the foreign country around her was best expressed.

If you tell a novelist, 'Life's not like that', he has to do something about it. The poet simply replies, 'No, but I am.

Now I think poetry will save nothing from oblivion, but I keep writing about the ordinary because for me it's the home of the extraordinary, the only home.

The irony is, going to work every day became the subject of probably my best poetry.

Now I think poetry will save nothing from oblivion, but I keep writing about the ordinary because for me it's the home of the extraordinary, the only home.

How weightless words are when nothing will do. from "Gospel

I am the soul stretching into the furthest reaches of my fingers and beyond from "Last Words," The New Yorker , Poems: December 13, 1982 Issue.

I have tried to write poetry for people for whom there is no poetry.

Until people see poetry as springing from all of life, they will isolate it in a creativity corner and treat it like a mascot.

Yoko Ono, quite simply, did things that John Lennon did not dare.

Paul said it would be better for them to express their views back in Britain, because "there, people listen a bit more. In America, they hold everything against you.

He had always loved to draw and paint, begging to be bought pencils, paint boxes, and paper rather than toys, spending hours wrapped up in worlds of his own creation.