John Cooper Clarke Quotes

Poetry and progress are like two ambitious men who hate one another with an instinctive hatred, and when they meet upon the same road, one of them has to give place.

All progress has resulted from people who took unpopular positions.

Spoken word poetry is the art of performance poetry. I tell people it involves creating poetry that doesn't just want to sit on paper, that something about it demands it be heard out loud or witnessed in person.

I wrote some bad poetry that I published in North African journals, but even as I withdrew into this reading, I also led the life of a kind of young hooligan.

'Whiplash' scared me. I feel you should only do projects that scare you to some degree. I get motivated by those sorts of feelings.

I'm not saying that everyone should swim with sharks, but sometimes you have to jump over your own shadow in order to learn something that you will never forget for the rest of your life. Then you know you can conquer your fears.

There has to be this pioneer, the individual who has the courage, the ambition to overcome the obstacles that always develop when one tries to do something worthwhile, especially when it is new and different.

As I said there is nothing wrong with failing. Pick yourself up and try it again. You never are going to know how good you really are until you go out and face failure.

If at first you don't succeed, then skydiving definitely isn't for you.

Next to trying and winning, the best thing is trying and failing.

Failing passionately is a success in its own right.

I wrote some of the worst poetry west from the Mississippi River, but I wrote. And I finally sometimes got it right.

I want to not settle for one thing. Because I come from a place where I have nothing to lose.

I was pushing for a career in poetry and of course the received wisdom was that you would never make a living at it.

Yes, it was difficult - making 'The Act of Killing' in particular was a very lonely process. No one really believed in it until very close to the end. But it was also a sanctuary. I was working in obscurity.

I think we should always challenge ourselves to do things that have never been done.

There is a great quote from a female writer. She said, 'If you don't break out in a sweat of fear when you write, you are not writing well enough. I tend to agree. I think my best pictures come when I push myself.

I do feel that now and I feel that this development of recording poems, of speaking poems at readings, of having records of poets, I think this is a wonderful thing. I'm very excited by it. In a sense, there's a return, isn't there, to the old role of the poet, which was to speak to a group of people, to come across.

The minute someone says 'Oh God, you could never do that; you can't get that kind of stuff on the air'...that's the kind of stuff I want to do.

[...] My wild words slip into fusion and risk losing the solid ground. So stranger, get wilder still. Probe the highlands.

Sometimes a writer, like an acrobat, must try a trick that is too much for him.

It's all part of taking a chance and expanding man's horizons. The future doesn't belong to the fainthearted; it belongs to the brave.

I think that America is in danger of losing its adventurous spirit in the cause of some kind of illusion of safety, or substitute of law and order there.

Only the impossible is worth attempting. In everything else one is sure to fail.

Doing what you're afraid of, getting out of your comfort zone, taking risks like that- that's what life is.