Gustave Flaubert Quotes

Poetic justice, poetic justice.. if I told you that a flower bloom in a dark room would you trust it. I mean I write poems in these songs.

If I'm writing, I'll say something metaphorical or approximate, whereas scientists are very precise.

And poets, in my view, and I think the view of most people, do speak God's language - it's better, it's finer, it's language on a higher plane than ordinary people speak in their daily lives.

I always wanted to ride a dragon myself, so I decided to do this for a year in my imagination.

Writing poems is a chance to construct spaces that I want to imaginatively inhabit.

'Modelland' has always been a part of my mind and my heart. I'm excited that you'll be able to read about this magical world that's been living in my dreams for so many years.

Using the device of an imaginary world allows me in some strange way to go to the central issues - it's one of many ways to express feelings about real people, about real human relationships.

I'm a very boring person, and all I do is want to paint and to record what I feel moves me or what interests me, and that can be in the form of a pig or in the form of President Kennedy.

A novel - it's also a way of attacking subjects that you cannot confront in the eye.

Literally' - I'm not having it; people can't go around saying 'literally.' Otherwise, what's literal? There's not another word for literally: if it isn't figurative or metaphorical, what is it? It's literal: there's no substitute.

Poetry is this gorgeous, complex history rendered in verse and song, a blueprint that can lead you back into the world after you've walked into air.

You go to a poem to get the mystery - and sometimes you go to get more confused.

And what is the very essence of poetry if it is not this 'metaphorical language'-this marking of the before unapprehended relations of things?

Truth speaks best in the language of poetry and symbolism, I think.

Poetry is a fossil rock-print of a fin and a wing, with an illegible oath between.

All I can do is turn a phrase until it catches the light.

You can t, in sound morals, condemn a man for taking care of his own integrity. It is his clear duty. And least of all can you condemn an artist pursuing, however humbly and imperfectly, a creative aim. In that interior world where his thought and his emotions go seeking for the experience of imagined adventures, there are no policemen, no law, no pressure of circumstance or dread of opinion to keep him within bounds. Who then is going to say Nay to his temptations if not his conscience?

My weapon has always been language, and I've always used it, but it has changed. Instead of shaping the words like knives now, I think they're flowers, or bridges.

A poem compresses much in a small space and adds music, thus heightening its meaning.

Poetry is the shadow cast by our streetlight imaginations.

I use a lot of similes and metaphors when I work, simply because it's my best way of describing a building or a scene. I'm terrible at describing landscapes - trees, buildings. The inanimate things don't interest me: I always think, "Oh, no, here comes another building I have to describe." So I usually use a simile or metaphor.

My wife has a beastly habit of comparing poetry -- all literature in fact -- to the droppings of the goats among the rocks -- mere excreta that fertilises the ground it falls on.

His voice wore no pants.

What is poetry? Do not enquire. The secret dies by prying. How does the heart beat? I fainted when I saw it on the screen, opening and closing like a flower ... Poetry is like this, it is life moving, terrible, vivid. Look the other way when you write, or you might faint.