Miller Williams Quotes

Poetry finds its perilous equilibrium somewhere between music and speech.

Speech is human, silence is divine, yet also brutish and dead: therefore we must learn both arts.

I wish I could write lyrical poems, but I just write the way they come.

For my part, if I consider poetry as an object, I maintain that it is born of the necessity of adding a vocal sound (speech) to the hammering of the first tribal music.

While I've had a great distaste for what's usually called song in modern poetry or for what's usually called music, I really don't think of speech as so far from song.

The American public does not know poets exist.

For instance, it's a little better now than it was two or three years ago, but something like 70% of the poems I receive seem to be written in the present indicative.

Only just the right quantum of wit should be put into a book; in conversation a little excess is allowable.

The only reason why we wish to exchange thoughts is that we are different. If we were all the same, we would die dumb. No thought would be expressed after we found that our thoughts were precisely alike. We differ-our thoughts are different. Therefore the commerse that we call conversation.

When I think of talking, it is of course with a woman. For talking at its best being an inspiration, it wants a corresponding divine quality of receptiveness, and where will you find this but in a woman?

Most poets who have little or nothing to say are concerned primarily with the way in which they say it ... if it is true that the style of a poem and the poem itself are one, ... it may be ... that the poets who have little or nothing to say are, or will be, the poets that matter.

For it is not metres, but a metre-making argument that makes a poem.

One must talk. That's how it is. One must.

Poems don't have to rhyme... Poems are about beauty and emotion; in other words poems are about feelings.

It's not what enters men's mouth that is evil," said the alchemist. It's what comes out of their mouths that is.

The voice does go up in a poem. It is an address, even if it is to oneself.

Writing is the best way to talk without being interrupted.

We are more anxious to speak than to be heard.

I started then to try and shape something rather than just express it and when I started to shape something and to imitate other poems that were written by other people, when I had tried to integrate my reading and my writing I was on my path.

Talking payes no toll.

Speaking is a beautiful folly; with that man dances over all things.

The only thing that exists is torment, lyricism, and the magnificence of language.

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.

Conversation is not a search after knowledge, but an endeavor at effect.

I've always liked the idea of improvised music. Improvised anything. It's what conversation is.