Eavan Boland Quotes

Dealing with poetry is a daunting task, simply because the reason one does it as an editor at all is because one is constantly coming to terms with one's own understanding of how to understand the world.

As for how criticism of Keats' poetry relates to criticism of my own work, I'll leave that for others to decide.

Give a critic an inch, he'll write a play.

I wrote poems in my corner of the Brooks Street station. I sent them to two editors who rejected them right off. I read those letters of rejection years later and I agreed with those editors.

Literature, of course, is not a contest.

Write how you want, the critic shall show the world you could have written better.

In 'Out of the Dark,' I'm talking about my own life. I'm not talking as a character or speaking as a character. I was not as free as when I write fiction.

When I write a song, it comes from the heart and is based on a specific experience. You can't really say that one experience is greater than another, because all of your experiences take you through life on this journey.

I'm uncomfortable with the focus on the poet and not on the poem.

How do poems grow? They grow out of your life.

You are always drawing from your personal life and using your imagination to fill in the blanks.

The projects that I've been fortunate enough to do are all projects where I followed my heart. I didn't follow the money or the names. It's all about reflecting my life and my art.

I wasn't a very good writer before college. I don't think I was a very good reader.

I think it was really important for me before I 'debuted myself' in front of the world to have a private life with my imagination and my writing for several years. That also made it so I didn't feel desperate for someone to find me.

It was through poetry I learned just to appreciate my own voice and to not think of my voice in terms of what it needs to be able to do, but what it can do.

If a poet interprets a poem of his own he limits its suggestibility.

You don't have to fight dragons to write books. You just have to live deeply the life you've been given.

For the first time I am working on a book that is not limited and that will take every bit of experience and thought and feeling that I have.

Golf is the only-est sport. You're completely alone with every conceivable opportunity to defeat yourself. Golf brings out your assets and liabilities as a person. The longer you play, the more certain you are that a man's performance is the outward manifestation of who, in his heart, he really thinks he is.

Nothing has transformed my life more than realizing that it's a waste of time to evaluate my worthiness by weighing the reaction of the people in the stands.

Art finds her own perfection within, and not outside of, herself. She is not to be judged by any external standard of resemblance.

Each new epoch in life seems an encounter. There is a tussle and a cloud of dust, and we come out of it triumphant or crest-fallen, according as we have borne ourselves.

I've never made an excuse of not knowing my father, because I've had great people in my life.

Don't judge yourself by someone else's standards. You will always lose

To be a woman in your forties, I think it's a fantastic decade.