Writing

"When words lose their meaning, physical force takes over."

"Poets, like fighters, both reap the benefits of roadwork."

"I will go to campus alone dressed in antique silk slips and beat-up cowboy boots and gypsy beads, and I will study poetry. I will sit on the edge of the fountain in the plaza and write."

"The crazy thing about poetry is how its simplicity makes it complicated."

"I'll be writing as long as I can hold a pen in my curled, crimped arthritic hands and then I'll dictate it, if it comes to that. They'll have to pry my pen out of my cold, dead fingers - and even then, I'll fight 'em for it. Guaranteed."

"Blackadder was fifty-four and had come to editing Ash out of pique. He was the son and grandson of Scottish schoolmasters. His grandfather recited poetry on firelight evenings: Marmion, Childe Harold, Ragnarok. His father sent him to Downing College in Cambridge to study under F. R. Leavis. Leavis did to Blackadder what he did to serious students; he showed him the terrible, the magnificent importance and urgency of English literature and simultaneously deprived him of any confidence in his own capacity to contribute to, or change it. The young Blackadder wrote poems, imagined Dr Leavis’s comments on them, and burned them."

"Imagine what you are writing about. See it and live it. Do not think it up laboriously, as if you were working out mental arithmetic. Just look at it, touch it, smell it, listen to it, turn yourself into it. When you do this, the words look after themselves, like magic."

"Those moments before a poem comes, when the heightened awareness comes over you, and you realize a poem is buried there somewhere, you prepare yourself. I run around, you know, kind of skipping around the house, marvelous elation. It’s as though I could fly."

"It’s not the word made flesh we want in writing, in poetry and fiction, but the flesh made word"

"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."

"Base words are uttered only by the base And can for such at once be understood;But noble platitudes — ah, there's a case Where the most careful scrutiny is needed To tell a voice that's genuinely good From one that's base but merely has succeeded."

"Most people are much better at saying things in letters than in conversation, and some people can write artistic, inventive letters, but when they try a poem or story or novel they become pretentious."

"There have been times I've felt so much art in my soul I grew sick of artists."

"I write in order to comprehend, not to express myself."

"A skillful literary artist has constructed a tale. If wise, he has not fashioned his thoughts to accommodate his incidents; but having conceived, with deliberate care, a certain unique or single effect to be wrought out, he then invents as may best aid him in establishing this preconceived effect. If his very initial sentence tend not to the outbringing of this effect, then he has failed in his first step. In the whole composition there should be no words written, of which the tendency, direct or indirect, is not to the one pre-established design. And by such means, with such care and skill, a picture is at length painted which leaves in the mind of him who contemplates it with a kindred art, a sense of the fullest satisfaction. The idea of the tale has been presented unblemished because undisturbed: and this is an end unattainable by the novel. Undue brevity is just as exceptionable here as in the poem; but undue length is yet more to be avoided."

". . . chasing after words like trying to grab the tails of comets."

"When one does something, one must do it wholly and well. Those bastard existences where you sell suet all day and write poetry at night are made for mediocre minds – like those horses that are equally good for saddle and carriage, the worst kind, that can neither jump a ditch nor pull a plow."

"The Author To Her Book Thou ill-formed offspring of my feeble brain,Who after birth did'st by my side remain,Till snatcht from thence by friends, less wise than true,Who thee abroad exposed to public view,Made thee in rags, halting to th' press to trudge,Where errors were not lessened (all may judge). At thy return my blushing was not small,My rambling brat (in print) should mother call. I cast thee by as one unfit for light,The visage was so irksome in my sight,Yet being mine own, at length affection would Thy blemishes amend, if so I could. I washed thy face, but more defects I saw,And rubbing off a spot, still made a flaw. I stretcht thy joints to make thee even feet,Yet still thou run'st more hobbling than is meet. In better dress to trim thee was my mind,But nought save home-spun cloth, i' th' house I find. In this array, 'mongst vulgars may'st thou roam. In critic's hands, beware thou dost not come,And take thy way where yet thou art not known. If for thy father askt, say, thou hadst none;And for thy mother, she alas is poor,Which caused her thus to send thee out of door."

"All a poet can do today is warn."

"ld heads forgetful of their sins,Old, learned, respectable bald heads Edit and annotate the lines That young men, tossing on their beds,Rhymed out in love’s despair To flatter beauty’s ignorant ear. They’ll cough in the ink to the world’s end;Wear out the carpet with their shoes Earning respect; have no strange friend;If they have sinned nobody knows. Lord, what would they say Should their Catullus walk that way?"