W. S. Merwin Quotes

If I were to have a dream job, it would probably be a poet. Then again, I don't think I'm a very good poet!

I think more people in the mainstream, folks like Nancy Wilson and Luther Vandross, they have openly expressed their love for God, and when mainstream artists start expressing their love for God openly in their concerts and including gospel songs in their concert, and, you know, people started embracing it.

I come from the performance world, but the idea of a worship song is different. It's useful music.

I knew I wanted to be a writer at 13. Before that, I told everyone I was going to be an artist.

All you hear Catholics turning out these days are pop versions of the old Protestant anthems.

Could I have chosen my own genius, I should have made myself a great poet.

If there is one thing left that I would like to do, it's to write something really beautiful. And I could do it, you know. I could still do it.

I am aware that a computer can’t create a poem, but neither can a typewriter.

The time is right to mix sentences with dirt and the sun with punctuation and rain with verbs.

For poets (bear the word) Half-poets even, are still whole democrats.

Language is the machine of the poet.

In fact, one of the things that I really love about literary fiction is that it's one of the few kinds of writing that doesn't tell us what to think or what to buy or what to wear. We're surrounded by advertising.

None of us older writers had gone through such a school. We are all self-taught. And, of course, there is always, in such a school, the danger of goose-stepping, uniformed ranks. But the Serapion Brethren have already, it seems to me, outgrown this danger. Each of them has his own individuality and his own handwriting. The common thing they have derived from the studio is the art of writing with ninety-proof ink, the art of eliminating everything that is superfluous, which is, perhaps, more difficult than writing.

...when the words pour out of you just right, you understand that these sentences are all part of a river flowing out of your own distant, hidden ranges, and all words become the dissolving snow that feeds your mountain streams forever. The language locks itself in the icy slopes of our own high passes, and it is up to us, the writers, to melt the glaciers within us. When these glaciers break off, we get to call them novels, the changelings of our burning spirits, our life's work.

My husband says I have too much imagination, but I don't think a writer can have too much imagination!

Poetry is a peerless proficiency of the imagination.

Oh what a poet I will flay myself into.

I write to create red in a world that often appears black and white.

It's funny, but I think my stories - the good ones - they're much smarter than I am.

Daydreaming had started me on the way; but story writing once I was truly in its grip, took me and shook me awake.

Art is based on a strong sentiment of religion,--on a profound and mighty earnestness; hence it is so prone to co-operate with religion.

Writing is nearly always a matter of finding whatever your brain needs to trick it into being creative, and in my case, a tiny little bit of fact just seems to work.

If there is a magic in story writing, and I am convinced there is, no one has ever been able to reduce it to a recipe that can be passed from one person to another.

Creativity is basically a feminine process. I'm convinced that we have in our soul, everybody, this masculine side and this feminine side. So at the end of the day, you always use this feminine creative energy to write or to do any type of art or creativity. So if I see that my protagonist is feminine, it's not more difficult, no. And even when my protagonist is masculine, I'm writing from using this feminine energy.

I write weird stories. I don't know why I like weirdness so much ... But when I write, I write weird. That's very strange. When I'm getting more and more serious, I'm getting more and more weird.