Thomas Mann Quotes

Very early in life I became fascinated with the wonders language can achieve. And I began playing with words.

Young writers find their first audience in little magazines, and experimental writers find their only audience there.

Poetry is a beautiful way of spoiling prose, and the laborious art of exchanging plain sense for harmony.

Gregory Corso used to get really pissed when people called Bob Dylan a 'poet.' After writing poetry for a few years, I can understand that.

The bad poet is a toady mimicking nature.

What you compose with is neither here nor there, you compose with words, or you compose with stone plants and trees, or you compose with events; the Sheriff's officer, or whatever.

It's easier to do Shakespeare than Spelling, and I know that sounds crazy, because the challenge of Shakespeare is living up to Shakespeare, living up to that word, not failing, you know, where with Aaron Spelling it's like, just try to look good. Or maybe don't use Spelling there, that's bad. No - you can. He's dead.

Here I sit, beneath the large window of a first-floor Georgian flat, exploring the corridors of my sordid imagination for comedic words of beauty.

In the world of words, the imagination is one of the forces of nature.

I swim in a sea of words. They flow around me and through me and, by a process that is not fully clear to me, some delicate hidden membrane draws forth the stuff that is the necessary condition of my life.

If it is an imperfect word, no external circumstance can heighten its value as poetry.

The poetical language of an age should be the current language heightened.

I continue to write essays about art. The visual is always part of my work, and it gives me immense pleasure to make up the words of art and create them verbally rather than build them.

Poetry; a criticism of life under the conditions fixed for such a criticism by the laws of poetic truth and poetic beauty.

Shakespeare often writes so ill that you hesitate to believe he could ever write supremely well; or, if this way of putting it seem indecorous and abominable, he very often writes so well that you are loth to believe he could ever have written thus extremely ill.

I'm happy to be a writer - of prose, poetry, every kind of writing. Every person in the world who isn't a recluse, hermit or mute uses words. I know of no other art form that we always use.

I read a lot of poetry, and I love what it does with language. I love music, too, and I think there's probably no coincidence there, that the rhythm of the words is almost as important as the words themselves, and when you can get the two working together, which usually takes me about 20 goes, I feel a huge satisfaction.

Every good poet includes a critic, but the reverse is not true.

I am a writer of fragments.

Poets don't draw. They unravel their handwriting and then tie it up again, but differently.

I always thought that poetry is the verdict that others give to a certain kind of writing. So to call yourself a poet is a kind of dangerous description. It's for others; it's for others to use.

Poetry seems to be the only weapon able to beat language, using language's own means.

Writing in modern Hebrew is a bit like playing chamber music inside a huge, empty cathedral. If you are not very careful with the echoes, you may evoke some monstrosities.

I would rather write poems than prose, any day, any place. Yet each has its own force.

I always thought of words as art supplies.