John Fowles Quotes

To write at the same temperature at which I live I should write nothing but poetry.

According to its doctors, my one intransigent desire is to have been a Confederate general, and because I could not or would not become anything else, I set up for poet and beg an to invent fictions about the personal ambitions that my society has no use for.

We all write poems; it is simply that poets are the ones who write in words.

I know how fiction matters to me, because if I want to express myself, I have to make up a story. Some people call it imagination. To me, it's not imagination. It's just a way of watching.

Not only is your story worth telling, but it can be told in words so painstakingly eloquent that it becomes a song.

From the night, his solitude, the poet finds day and starts a diary that is lethal to the inert. The dark landscape yields a dialogue.

I like to write poetry.

Careers don't interest me. The only thing that interests me is continuing to be a poet on one level or another, whether acting or writing or directing.

A person sets out to write a poem for a variety of reasons: to win the heart of his beloved; to express his attitude toward the reality surrounding him, be it a landscape or a state; to capture his state of mind at a given instant; to leave - as he thinks at that moment - a trace on the earth.

I'm an actress, primarily. I love to write poetry. I've been writing poetry since I was 12 years old.

I wrote poetry from the time I could write. That was the only way I could begin to express who I was but the poems didn't make sense to my teachers. They didn't rhyme. They were about the wind sounds, the planets' motions, never about who I was or how I felt. I didn't think I felt anything. I was this mind more than a body or a heart. My mind photographing the stars, hearing the wind.

Nothing so difficult as a beginning In poesy, unless perhaps the end.

I am composed of contradictions, which is why poetry is a better form for me than philosophy

It’s not the word made flesh we want in writing, in poetry and fiction, but the flesh made word

Poetry might be defined as the clear expression of mixed feelings.

I have a dark and dreadful secret. I write poetry... I believe poetry is a primal impulse within all of us. I believe we are all capable of it and furthermore that a small, often ignored corner of us positively yearns to try it.

Writing is a combination of being alert to your outer surroundings and alive to your inner reality.

I was so used to doing art that my fingers were like albino spiders. So it was just natural for me to go to a typewriter and write poetry.

Writing is my number one passion. I've written two novels. I've written a screenplay. I also write short stories and poetry.

Often with good sentiments we produce bad literature.

The triumph of writing fiction is that by doing so, writers can build a more ideal world in themselves.

Writing has always been my go-to form of expression. Whenever I was going through something as a kid, I would write it down and I would turn it into a poem.

The poems I did write there [in Harvard] include Alphabets the 1984 Phi Beta Kappa poem and A Sofa in the Forties. And, of course, the John Harvard poem for the 350th anniversary Villanelle for an Anniversary.

This is the gift all writers seek-to write language that incandesces yet does not melt.

The writer's life seethes within but not without.