William Makepeace Thackeray Quotes

I always tell students that writing a poem and publishing it are two quite separate things, and you should write what you have to write, and if you're afraid it's going to upset someone, don't publish it.

Literature, of course, is not a contest.

When critics are waiting to pounce upon poetic style on exactly the same grounds as if it were prose, the poets tremble.

I don't think it's always good to read lots of poetry.

In fact a lot of them I think are absolute baloney. Those Charles Olsens and people like that. At first I was interested in seeing what they were up to, what they were doing, why they were doing it. They never moved me in the way that one is moved by true poetry.

The easiest songs to write are pure fiction. There is no limit to how you can tell the story. I find it difficult when I'm replaying an event through a song.

I shall never be ashamed of citing a bad author if the line is good.

I play purely from the heart, y'know, and so if it doesn't work the first couple of hours, forget it.

A poem generated by its own laws may be unrealized and bad in terms of so-called objective principles of taste, judgement, deduction.

I think my poems are slightly underrated by the word 'accessible.'

I love writing, but I have that E. E. Cummings idea that as long as you stay inside the rules of your own world, it doesn't matter what it is.

The radio stations will happily recycle a badly worded statement by a politician all day but will steer clear of broadcasting more than once or twice a poem by Tomas Transtromer or Rita Dove.

I've always found the Write-What-You-Know axiom small and stifling.

People who are knowledgeable about poetry sometimes discuss it in that knowing, rather hateful way in which oenophiles talk about wine: robust, delicate, muscular. This has nothing to do with how most of us experience it, the heart coming around the corner and unexpectedly running into the mind. Of all the words that have stuck to the ribs of my soul, poetry has been the most filling.

I made wine from the lilac tree/Put my heart in its recipe/It makes me see what I want to see/And be what I want to be

It is no discredit to Walt Whitman that he wrote Leaves of Grass, only that he did not burn it afterwards.

The maximum value of art is that it allows the artist to express himself.

How much pleasure they lose (and even the pleasures of heroic poesy are not unprofitable) who take away the liberty of a poet, and fetter his feet in the shackles of a historian.

Music videos are very concrete and rigid. They don't allow for emotional interaction.

Literature ceases to be literature when it commits itself to moral uplift; it becomes moral philosophy or some such dull thing.

It is with noble sentiments that bad literature gets written.

I hope that the feeling of making poetry is not confined to the people who write it down. There is no luxury like it, and I hope we all share it. ... I am sure that the great glory of poetry in one's heart does not wait on achievement.

As nobody can possibly tell me whether one's writing is bad or good, the only certain value is one's own pleasure. I am sure of that.

People should be stopped from writing poetry. There's far too much of it. And if they're any good, they'll go ahead anyways.

I figure as an artist the best thing you can do is follow your heart - and if your heart is marketable, then you win.