Maxine Kumin Quotes

Words, yes, formulating things, creating something from your heart, it is something very necessary, yes.

I'm finding that writing poetry is strengthening my songwriting, because you're learning to make a piece of writing work on a page with nothing else. I was also finding within poetry I felt a lot more free to write about very different matters, to write about social issues or things that are going on around me.

One of the springs of poetry is joy.

Surely it is an odd way to spend your life - sitting alone in a room with a pen in your hand, hour after hour, day after day, year after year, struggling to put words on pieces of paper in order to give birth to what does not exist - except in your head. Why on earth would anyone want to do such a thing? The only answer I have ever been able to come up with is: because you have to, because you have no choice.

Something that you feel will find its own form.

Mostly, you become a writer not because you want to get rich or famous, but because you have to write; because there is something inside that must come out.

There is some reason to believe that when a man does not write his poetry it escapes by other vents through him, instead of the one vent of writing; clings to his form and manners, whilst poets have often nothing poetical about them except their verses.

In matters like writing and painting, a man does what he has to do - if he has to write, why then, he writes; and if he doesn't feel the urgent need of writing, there are dozens of professions in which it is easier to earn a comfortable living.

But writing poems and letters doesn't seem to do much good.

Actually, when I write, there is a feeling of necessity, of something that is stronger than myself that demands that I must write as I write.

He is exactly the poem I wanted to write.

If a story is in you, it has to come out.

Before my eyes are many miserable scenes, the suffering of others and myself forces my hands to move. I become a machine for writing.

The poetry and the songs that you are suppose to write, I believe are in your heart. You just have to open up your heart and not be afraid to get them out.

Not to write, for many of us, is to die.

I spend my whole life trying to put up a front to prevent people from seeing certain parts of me. Weirdly, when I go to write, I feel like I have to expose it, almost compulsively.

A professional writer is a joke. You write because you can't do anything else, and then you have another job.

When a man does not write his poetry, it escapes by other vents through him.

Poetry = Anger x Imagination

...there are two kinds of writing: the one you write and the one that writes you.

A poem begins with a lump in the throat; a homesickness or a love sickness. It is a reaching-out toward expression; an effort to find fulfillment. A complete poem is one where an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words.

Our truest response to the irrationality of the world is to paint or sing or write, for only in such response do we find truth.

it is only by expressing all that is inside that purer and purer streams come. ... Pour out the dull things on paper too-you can tear them up afterward-for only then do the bright ones come. If you hold back the dull things, you are certain to hold back what is clear and beautiful and true and lively.

Everybody can write poetry, just like everybody knows how to make love.

For me writing has always felt like praying even when I wasn't writing prayers.