Jesse Ball Quotes

I could start with Mandelstam, who was a huge influence on my early writing.

The best books of our times have included the three mature volumes of Philip Larkin. They're very short books of poems, and very carefully arranged.

For me, it was a formative experience reading Eliot when I was younger. 'The Waste Land,' in particular.

My favorite books are actually very complicated - 'One Hundred Years of Solitude', 'Ulysses'.

Prose on certain occasions can bear a great deal of poetry; on the other hand, poetry sinks and swoons under a moderate weight of prose.

When you are writing literary writing, you are communicating something subtextual with emotions and poetry. The prose has to have a voice; it's not just typing. It takes a while to get that voice.

Poetry is an art, and chief of the fine art; the easiest to dabble in, the hardest in which to reach true excellence.

I think the kind of unexpected I really love is when you open books and the actual way of writing is different and interesting. Like reading Virginia Woolf for the first time or Lawrence Durrell for the first time.

Walt Whitman’s famous poem, “Leaves of Grass” was catalogued by Google Books under “Gardening”.

I am a writer of fragments.

I'm not one of those James Joyce intellectuals who can stand back and look at the whole edifice... It was a slow process for me to just crawl out of it, like a snake leaving his skin behind.

Keats writes better about poems than anybody I've ever read. The things that he says about what he wants his own poems to be are the ideals that I share.

People think of poetry as a school subject... Poetry is very frustrating to students because they don't have a taste for ambiguity, for one thing. That gives them a poetry hangover.

I think if a poet wanted to lead, he or she would want the message to be unequivocally clear and free of ambiguity. Whereas poetry is actually the home of ambiguity, ambivalence and uncertainty.

I'm very attracted to poetry for all the reasons someone likes poetry. The notion of compression seems to fit my personality.

Poetry, just because it is poetry, doesn't mean it is some kind of magic spell.

A poem is bound by language, but a poetics is not.

My work should be seen as poetry.

One characteristic of modern poetry is that arrangement of parts which strikes many people as being violent or obscure.

I wanted to avoid all that literary stuff. I didn't want the self pity of 'The Portrait,' all the moaning and the whingeing. I'm not knocking Joyce: we all owe him a debt. He's the one who made so much possible.

Poetry is not an art or a branch of art: it's something more.

I think of being ornate as a Victorian quality, little to do with Shakespeare. But even Dickens wasn't ornate; he wrote with flow and naturalism.

The poet is someone, I think, who's interested in registering experience immediately or giving you the sense of immediacy and directness.

I've gained a lot from James Joyce, Tolstoy, Chekhov and R. K. Narayan. While writing, I try to see if the story is going to radiate spokes. Their literature has always done that and gifted me beautiful things.

I'd studied English literature at university, but I was also far more enamored with Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield, and James Joyce. That was my passion.