Morris West Quotes

I don't write things that are wildly abstractly atonal.

Bierce radiates brilliancy, and perhaps no other man of letters ever had a more ready command of condensed expression. For him, each word has its unique place in the peerage of words, and he would not use a word out of place any sooner than he would thrust an ape into a captain's saddle.

And poets, in my view, and I think the view of most people, do speak God's language - it's better, it's finer, it's language on a higher plane than ordinary people speak in their daily lives.

Perhaps things are not things but words: metaphors, words for other things.

People take songs so literally.

For me, prose walks, poetry dances.

I entirely agree with you about the obscurity of Mrs Browning's line about the stars. It is far-fetched. She wanted to express something which she found beyond expression.

Poetry has the virtue of being able to say twice as much as prose in half the time, and the drawback, if you do not give it your full attention, of seeming to say half as much in twice the time.

I don't like poetry that just slaps violent words on a canvas, as it were.

Writing poetry is the hard manual labor of the imagination.

If I asked for a cup of coffee, someone would search for the double meaning.

I always thought of words as art supplies.

Somehow it seems more clever to refer to something instead of saying it.

....Worthy would-be worlds of words, whorls of working wonder.

Words make love on the page like flies in the summer heat and the poet is only the bemused spectator.

A poem is a cup of words open to the sky and wind in a bucket.

Tree limbs rise and fall like the ecstatic arms of those who have submitted to the mystical life. Leaf sounds talk together like poets making fresh metaphors.

One day while studying a Yeats poem I decided to write poetry the rest of my life. I recognized that a single short poem has room for history, music, psychology, religious thought, mood, occult speculation, character, and events of one's own life. I still feel surprised that such various substances can find shelter and nourishment in a poem. A poem in fact may be a sort of nourishing liquid, such as one uses to keep an amoeba alive. If prepared right, a poem can keep an image or a thought or insights on history or the psyche alive for years, as well as our desires and airy impulses.

Wit will shine Through the harsh cadence of a rugged line.

I am talking about poetry. It's like that line from [John] Yeats: I go back to "where all the ladders start/ In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart."

Thought must be hidden in the verse like nutritional virtue in a fruit.

Poetry is a shuffling of boxes of illusions buckled with a strap of facts.

I was always aware, reading Chesterton, that there was someone writing this who rejoiced in words, who deployed them on the page as an artist deploys his paints upon his palette. Behind every Chesterton sentence there was someone painting with words, and it seemed to me that at the end of any particularly good sentence or any perfectly-put paradox, you could hear the author, somewhere behind the scenes, giggling with delight.

Don't gobblefunk around with words.

For poetry the idea is everything; the rest is a world of illusion.