Sid Waddell Quotes

Writing poems is a chance to construct spaces that I want to imaginatively inhabit.

My mind is stuffed with quotes. Lines, couplets, paragraphs, stanzas; Bessie Smith, Stevie Smith, Tin Pan Alley, rock and roll. They tease or lead or hurl me into a dream space of jostling languages that I need to bask in each day in order to write.

Poets are always ahead of things in a certain way, their sense of language and their vision.

Poetry is the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits.

Clarity, clarity, surely clarity is the most beautiful thing in the world, A limited, limiting clarity I have not and never did have any motive of poetry But to achieve clarity.

I like to write poetry.

Deep feeling doesn't make for good poetry. A way with language would be a bit of help.

I love writing. I love the swirl and swing of words as they tangle with human emotions.

I like the way words go together and I like the gamesmanship of writing poetry. It is such a challenge.

I really wanted to work hard on my lyrics.

The taste for quotations (and for the juxtaposition of incongruous quotations) is a Surrealist taste.

I do tend to take lines from other lines I like, and then write around them.

Anything well written with good language and clarity and honesty is worth doing. It comes out of the same tradition as Shakespeare.

The best song lyrics seem to me so artful, so brilliant, so warm and humorous, with both passion and wit, that my admiration is matched only by my envy.

I was very committed to the process of composing, working at poems, putting things together and taking them apart like some kind of experimental filmmaker.

Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia.

I am a writer of fragments.

I've always been a fan of poetry. I grew up with Lawrence Ferlinghetti and the Beat poets. I really followed that stuff for a while. I just love the way people threw words around like they were painting.

I love taking on other people's words. They are much more interesting to me than my own.

When I'm in certain moods, a conversation will start up in my head, and suddenly I'll realize that the language has reached a very high and interesting level, and then lines and stanzas will just kind of appear, full-blown.

Poets don't draw. They unravel their handwriting and then tie it up again, but differently.

I'm a failed poet. Reading poetry helps me to see the world differently, and I try to infuse my prose with figurative language, which goes against the trend in fiction.

I don't write just to be clever. But sometimes I do. And if you don't have an understanding of the language, then the way in which it's bent doesn't actually register. It's the old you-gotta-paint-like-them-before-you-can-paint-like-you thing.

I was always making up rhymes. But I never thought that poetry would become my life.

There is an art to writing, and it is not always disclosure. The act itself can be beautiful, revelatory, and private.