Writing

"When you're a student of poetry, you're lucky if you don't realize how untalented you are until you get a little better. Otherwise, you would just stop."

"The one who pulls the puppet strings knows fairytales can heal."

"If I knew what to do I'd do more than write a song for you"

"Poetry is only the highest eloquence of passion, the most vivid form of expression that can be given to our conception of anything, whether pleasurable or painful, mean or dignified, delightful or distressing. It is the perfect coincidence of the image and the words with the feeling we have, and of which we cannot get rid in any other way, that gives an instant "satisfaction to the thought." This is equally the origin of wit and fancy, of comedy and tragedy, of the sublime and pathetic."

"Music resembles poetry, in each Are nameless graces which no methods teach,And which a master hand alone can reach."

"Memang sulit menulis puisi. Dan untuk apa mempersulit diri sendiri."

"You ask me why I don't speak Not a word at will But write so much worth well over a mill'Well I value words like I value kisses A sober one, a closer one penetrates the heart Darling it's how it mends it"

"Still must the poet as of old,In barren attic bleak and cold,Starve, freeze, and fashion verses to Such things as flowers and song and you;Still as of old his being give In Beauty's name, while she may live,Beauty that may not die as long As there are flowers and you and song."

"Every time your work is read, you die several deaths for every word, and poetry is like being flayed alive."

" ‘Paradise Lost’ was printed in an edition of no more than 1,500 copies and transformed the English language. Took a while. Wordsworth had new ideas about nature: Thoreau read Wordsworth, Muir read Thoreau, Teddy Roosevelt read Muir, and we got a lot of national parks. Took a century. What poetry gives us is an archive, the fullest existent archive of what human beings have thought and felt by the kind of artists who loved language in a way that allowed them to labor over how you make a music of words to render experience exactly and fully."

"The novel is a formidable mass, and it is so amorphous - no mountain in it to climb, no Parnassus or Helicon, not even a Pisgah. It is most distinctly one of the moister areas of literature - irrigated by a hundred rills and occasionally degenerating into a swamp. I do not wonder that the poets despise it, though they sometimes find themselves in it by accident. And I am not surprised at the annoyance of the historians when by accident it finds itself among them."

"The inkstand is full of ink, and the paper lies white and unspotted, in the round of light thrown by a candle. Puffs of darkness sweep into the corners, and keep rolling through the room behind his chair. The air is silver and pearl, for the night is liquid with moonlight. See how the roof glitters, like ice!Over there, a slice of yellow cuts into the silver-blue, and beside it stand two geraniums, purple because the light is silver-blue, to-night."

"How could poetry and literature have arisen from something as plebian as the cuneiform equivalent of grocery-store bar codes? I prefer the version in which Prometheus brought writing to man from the gods. But then I remind myself that…we should not be too fastidious about where great ideas come from. Ultimately, they all come from a wrinkled organ that at its healthiest has the color and consistency of toothpaste, and in the end only withers and dies."

"If I'm still wistful about On the Road, I look on the rest of the Kerouac oeuvre--the poems, the poems!--in horror. Read Satori in Paris lately? But if I had never read Jack Kerouac's horrendous poems, I never would have had the guts to write horrendous poems myself. I never would have signed up for Mrs. Safford's poetry class the spring of junior year, which led me to poetry readings, which introduced me to bad red wine, and after that it's all just one big blurry condemned path to journalism and San Francisco."

"Talent is a faucet. When it is on, one must write. Inspiration is a farce that poets have invented to give themselves importance."

"Everything has its poetry. 94"

"And so I pray I am today as honestwith myself, with life all around me and below and above me,with all who I encounter."

"Saki says that youth is like hors d'oeuvres: you are so busy thinking of the next courses you don't notice it. When you've had them, you wish you'd had more hors d'oeuvres."

"There is bad in all good authors: what a pity the converse isn't true!"

"Dear, I can't write, it's all a fantasy: a kind of circling obsession."