Stephen Dunn Quotes

The poet will not be satisfied with recording, the poet will have to transform.

You can have a poem like "B-Movie" and sum up thirty conversations that people have had on the subject, but I wrote it down, and other people didn't.

And Mandelstam says a poet - you go down to the shore and you see an unlikely looking from a bottle from the past, you open it. Mandelstam says, "It's okay to do so. I'm not reading someone else's mail. It was addressed to whoever found it. I found it, therefore it's addressed to me."

I gave my voice to poetry.

You can't deduce the personality of the potter from the pots. It's a thingy you've made and offered to somebody else for their use, and, believe me, a novel is like that. It's a made thing and ought not to contain a direct self-expression of the writer.

You are the plays you write. How on earth could you write them otherwise? They're projections of your own predilections.

When I was young and easily outraged, I would be upset when every fictional character I created was somehow reduced to 'autobiography.'

I'm not angry; I write about angry characters. When I'm doing that, I'm happy. Just like when I'm writing about Mickey Sabbath being lustful, I'm not feeling lustful; I'm happy.

I think other people's interpretations of what I've written are a lot better than what I have, because I don't understand a lot of what I write.

I once said a poet has the right to sing as loudly and vocally as he wants to. Most poets should face a rock n' roll audience for one night to keep them honest.

That's what writing is. It's moving past your fear.

I am no poet, but if you think for yourselves, as I proceed, the facts will form a poem in your minds.

The man who tells the tale if he has a tale worth telling will know exactly what he is about and this business of the artist as a sort of starry-eyed inspired creature, dancing along, with his feet two or three feet above the surface of the earth, not really knowing what sort of prints he's leaving behind him, is nothing like the truth.

Poetry can be criticized only through poetry. A critique which itself is not a work of art, either in content as representation of the necessary impression in the process of creation, or through its beautiful form and in its liberal tone in the spirit of the old Roman satire, has no right of citizenship in the realm of art.

Poetry is an act of distillation. It takes contingency samples, is selective. It telescopes time. It focuses what most often floods past us in a polite blur.

Every great masterpiece is a purification of the world.

All my novels are very much directly related to my inner life, even though I'm inventing characters, even though it's fiction, even though it's make-believe, it nevertheless is coming out of the deepest recesses of myself.

I can't live in a bubble and expect to come and work with Dior or go work on a movie and not have some kind of an evolution within myself and my own thought process and a passion about things or what's happening in the world. All of those things are the elements that make you who you are, and those are the things that sincerely come across in a photo or a commercial or in an interview. That's a constant thing for me.

For a poet, making poems is a way of viewing the world, being in the world, breathing.

I don't see myself directing things I don't write because, to me, directing was just an extension of the writing process.

From the beginning [of the Lincoln in the Bardo], I actually had it in mind not to write a novel. I'd kind of gotten past that point where I felt bad for never having written a novel, even to where I felt really good about it, like I was a real purist.

The best I do, if I'm just playing around and riffing in a fantasy world, and then I'll write something down. Hopefully I write it down.

Though people may read more into Ulysses than I ever intended, who is to say that they are wrong: do any of us know what we are creating?Which of us can control our scribblings? They are the script of one's personality like your voice or your walk

The thing that hasn't changed, and I don't think will ever change, is that the operative word in music is "play." You have to have a playfulness about it. As the world shifts, it's starting to understand more and more that to have a playfulness about any and everything is actually the way of having a better life, or being more creative, or being more productive.

The vocation of each writer is to describe the world as he or she sees it; anything more than that is advertising.