A. R. Ammons Quotes

Memory marks the horizon of our consciousness, imagination its zenith.

I throw everything I have into whatever story I'm writing - and so there's something immensely gratifying about finishing one piece and then starting fresh with a new setting, time period and cast of characters, getting to see the world through a completely different lens each time.

For our purposes as human beings, the mind is the center of everything.

I don't have a drawer full of ideas. I kind of look around and take notes and wonder what could actually be a whole movie. And each time, I think I'm going to do it more commercial this time; I'm going to get a big budget and make it. But I always come up with some small idea.

I've been fascinated over the years by the way refrains work. Think, say, of the refrains in Yeats' ballads. Ideally, each time the refrain comes back in a poem, it is both the same and different. It works by counterpoint and reiteration. It accrues meaning.

I never think of an entire book at once. I always just start with a very small idea. In 'Holes,' I just began with the setting; a juvenile correctional facility located in the Texas desert. Then I slowly make up the story, and rewrite it several times, and each time I rewrite it, I get new ideas, and change the old ideas around.

I think that the mark of a great book is that it will meet you wherever you're at and you'll feel and experience something new and different each time you read it.

I've never written a children's book, but when people meet me for the first time and I say I write books, they invariably reply, 'Children's books?' Maybe it's something about my face.

Every time I write a new novel about something sombre and sobering and terrible I think, 'oh Lord, they're not going to want to go here'. But they do. Readers of fiction read, I think, for a deeper embrace of the world, of reality. And that's brave.

Writers, not psychiatrists, are the true interpreters of the human mind and heart, and we have been at it for a very long time.

I think that an artist is a bit like a computer. He receives information from the world around him and from his past and from his own experiences. And it all goes into the brain.

My parents both work in publishing, and I was a bright, academic kind of kid, and I read a lot of books, and when you read a lot, I guess the muscle that gets exercised is where you can hear the voices in your head. You can turn words into pictures and into sounds and into colours and smells.

You can't see fear or lust; you can't photograph someone's anxieties, how disappointment feels. Photographs are approximations.

I think a writer is a describer. She describes society and human nature as she sees it. She has to be both typical of that society and alone within it.

The eyes of the cheerful and of the melancholy man are fixed upon the same creation; but very different are the aspects which it bears to them.

Age is a matter of feeling, not of years.

When I wrote my fictional novels, they always had a starting point of something real. Those images that are not real are exactly the same strength and power of the real ones, and the line between them is completely blurred.

There is creative reading as well as creative writing.

Imagination is really dependent on memory and observation, these things that we think of as part of nonfiction writing, actually.

Inspiration can come from anywhere, and a lot of the time, it depends on how you feel when you get up in the morning.

Between the dreams of night and day there is not so great a difference.

To think is an act. To feel is a fact.

Happiness is an abstraction, it is a product of the imagination, it is a way of being moved, which depends entirely on our way of seeing and feeling.

As one gets older, one discovers everything is going to be exactly the same with different hats on.

Time is, of all modes of existence, most obsequious to the imagination.