Geoffrey C. Ward Quotes

A poet must be a psychologist, but a secret one: he should know and feel the roots of phenomena but present only the phenomena themselves in full bloom or as they fade away.

I admire 'Adventure Time' for being a piece of art in the way that I think art should be. If you want to see it is poetry, you can, and if you don't, you can watch a fun cartoon.

Somebody once said to me, 'If you want to be understood, don't write fiction.'

The novel should be understood as a structure built to accommodate the greatest possible amount of cool stuff.

If you're singing, you're telling a story. So to tell it and tell it right, that's it.

I just loved the idea of writing for different personalities all the time.

A poem, once it's written, is meant to be read with the inner voice of the person who reads it.

The short story is at an advantage over the novel, and can claim its nearer kinship to poetry, because it must be more concentrated, can be more visionary, and is not weighed down (as the novel is bound to be) by facts, explanation, or analysis. I do not mean to say that the short story is by any means exempt from the laws of narrative: it must observe them, but on its own terms.

Why does a literary scholar study the world of "fiction"? To show us that the facts can never be understood except in communion with the imagination.

It is popular to believe that in order to see clearly one must believe nothing. This may work well enough if you are observing cells under a microscope. It will not work if you are writing fiction. For the fiction writer, to believe nothing is to see nothing.

Le mensonge et les vers de tout temps sont amis. Lies and literature have always been friends.

We find little in a book but what we put there. But in great books, the mind finds room to put many things.

My mom is an artist and my own fiction is deeply visual.

Literature offers us all, writers and readers, the best method of discovering and retelling the changing story of ourselves. The story is both journey and surprise. And as everyone knows, even the past is altered, depending on, not the facts, but the interpretation.

Writing songs is no different than explaining to somebody what you dreamed last night: No one ever gives you crap for what you dreamed last night. "I was laying in my bed, and all of a sudden a stallion jumped on my bed and the next thing I know I was in Mars but it looked like my kitchen"... That's kind of what I do with my songs, write them in a dream-like manner. It's up to people to swallow it however they want.

That's what fiction is for. It's for getting at the truth when the truth isn't sufficient for the truth.

I really think that reading is just as important as writing when you're trying to be a writer because it's the only apprenticeship we have, it's the only way of learning how to write a story.

The appeal of writing is primarily the investigation of mystery.

He who reads a story only once is condemned to read the same story his whole life.

I always was interested in prose. As a teenager, I published short stories. And I always wanted to write the long short story, I wanted to write a novel. Now that I have attained, shall I say, a respectable age, and have had experiences, I feel much more interested in prose, in the novel. I feel that in a novel, for example, you can get in toothbrushes and all the paraphernalia that one finds in dally life, and I find this more difficult in poetry.

Literature is the most noble of professions. In fact, it is about the only one fit for a man.

The glory of a good tale is that it is limitless and fluid; a good tale belongs to each reader in its own particular way.

Fiction is of the essence of poetry as well as of painting; there is a resemblance in one of human bodies, things, and actions which are not real, and in the other of a true story by fiction.

Poetry does so many different things, it's difficult to say anything definitive about its role, which of course varies from culture to culture. It can range from being stories of the tribe to the private lyric, to being as W.H. Auden said "the clear expression of mixed feelings" to nonsense verse.