Frank McCourt Quotes

The best poetry will be found to have a power of forming, sustaining, and delighting us, as nothing else can.

A great many people seem to think writing poetry is worthwhile, even though it pays next to nothing and is not as widely read as it should be.

Poetry has been the guardian angel of humanity in all ages.

In the finest critics one hears the full cry of the human. They tell one why it matters to read.

So few people read poetry. That's sad, isn't it?

Poetry has never let me down. Without poetry, I would have found life less comprehensible, less bearable and infinitely less enjoyable.

Art is the means we have of undoing the damage of haste. It's what everything else isn't.

Literature is well enough, as a time-passer, and for the improvement and general elevation and purification of mankind, but it has no practical value.

Poetry is the apotheosis of sentiment.

I get some flak for and some resistance from colleagues for because I'm interested in storytelling. I mean what I like about songwriting is songs used to tell a story.

My confidence in the future of literature consists in the knowledge that there are things that only literature can give us, by means specific to it.

Classic literature is still something that hangs in the air like a song.

Everyone has the attitude that movies aren't just disposable entertainment - they can really mean something. I love that, because that's the way I feel about films.

Good prose is written only face to face with poetry.

What makes a good book? Scholars and critics have been debating that question for decades. I like books that touch my head and my heart at the same time.

You know, I didn't write my books for critics and scholars. I wrote them for students and artists. When I hear how much my work has meant to them--well, I can't tell you how happy that makes me. That means that this great stuff of myth, which I have been so privileged to work with, will be kept alive for a whole new generation. That's the function of the artists, you know, to reinterpret the old stories and make them come alive again, in poetry, painting, and now in movies.

Prose is a poor thing, a poor inadequate thing, compared with poetry which says so much more in shorter time.

What is art? It is not just nature, it is nurtured nature. It is intelligence applied to what physical ability you have.

The advice I continually give to young writers is this, "Learn to paint pictures with words." Not just once upon a time, but ... In the long secret dust of ages, beneath a blue forgotten sky, where trade winds caress the sun bleached shores of unknown realms ... See, as much as there are words in poetry, there is a poetry in words. Use it, stay faithful to the path you have set your heart upon and follow it.

The world of the arts is by no means always comfortable, but neither is it likely ever to be boring. It is full of surprises, humor, traps for the unwary, and challenges to smugness. It is a world of moods as well as of revelation, of beliefs and fears, of unpleasant truth as well as of delicious fantasy. Perhaps it is arrogant to say that anyone who does not venture into this world is only half-interested in life. I say it, nonetheless.

The creation of art is not the fulfillment of a need but the creation of a need. The world never needed Beethoven's Fifth Symphony until he created it. Now we could not live without it.

A work of art rests its merits in traditional qualities. It may constitute a remarkable feat in craftsmanship; it may be a searching study of psychological states; it may be a nostalgic glance backward; it may be any one of an infinite number of concepts, none of which may have any possible bearing upon its degree of newness.

The end-purpose of all art is enjoyment!

I feel the written word, poetry and literature is just one of the most beautiful things that human beings do. So we have to fight for it.

If you're a poet, you do something beautiful. I mean, you're supposed to leave something beautiful after you get off the page and everything. The ones you're talking about don't leave a single, solitary thing beautiful. All that maybe the slightly better ones do is sort of get inside your head and leave something there, but just because they do, just because they know how to leave something, it doesn't have to be a poem for heaven's sake. It may just be some kind of terribly fascinating, syntaxy droppings--excuse the expression. Like Manlius and Esposito and all those poor men.