Callan McAuliffe Quotes

Good poets have written in order to describe something or to preach something - with their eye on the object or the end. The essence of the poetry does not lie in the thing described or in the message imparted but in the resulting concrete unity, the poem.

I would never write realistic prose. I don't like people who try to write in a poetic style, but in the course of their book abandon it for realism, and weave back and forth like drunkards between the surreal and the real.

I've been influenced by poets as diverse as Dylan Thomas, Lewis Carroll, and Edgar Allan Poe.

Fiction and poetry are my first loves, but the really beautiful lyrical essay can do so much that other forms cannot.

I am a writer of fragments.

The poet is someone, I think, who's interested in registering experience immediately or giving you the sense of immediacy and directness.

When I really want to be soothed and reminded of why people bother to fiddle with sentences, I often read poetry.

I do not think of literature as something confessional or therapeutic. I make sentences in order to be precise about experiences and things. I am urged by many things and no things in particular.

Poetry is a beautiful way of spoiling prose, and the laborious art of exchanging plain sense for harmony.

Prose cannot compete with the economy of poetry, the ability to have a full artistic experience in a short period of time.

What you compose with is neither here nor there, you compose with words, or you compose with stone plants and trees, or you compose with events; the Sheriff's officer, or whatever.

I think every writer has a book that haunts them, and on some level, every book you write is a reaction to it. 'Lolita' is that book for me. Nabokov's love of wordplay, descriptive detail, artfully complex plots, and his themes of obsession and lost love, are inspiring.

All poetry has to do is to make a strong communication. All the poet has to do is listen. The poet is not an important fellow. There will also be another poet.

Poetry is finer and more philosophical than history; for poetry expresses the universal, and history only the particular.

Poetry is the language we speak in the most terrifying or ecstatic passages of our lives. But the very word poetry scares people. They think of their grade school teachers reciting 'Hiawatha' and they groan.

I really enjoy English and poetry and writing classes.

In writing, I try to find the right balance between momentum and infinity, truth and beauty.

I don't try to call myself a poet. But I know that my stuff is pretty literal, in that the themes are pretty simple and on the surface.

All my stories are webs of style and none seems at first blush to contain much kinetic matter. For me style is matter.

People want poetry. They need poetry. They get it. They don't want fancy work.

Theater is far superior to film in poetry, in abstract poetry.

With my fiction, I focused on chapters and overall conceptions, while in poetry, I crawled along in the trenches of each sentence, examining every word for a sign of a deeper significance.

A poem records emotions and moods that lie beyond normal language, that can only be patched together and hinted at metaphorically.

My favorite poem ever was 'Annabel Lee' by Edgar Allan Poe.

For myself, the only way I know how to make a book is to construct it like a collage: a bit of dialogue here, a scrap of narrative, an isolated description of a common object, an elaborate running metaphor which threads between the sequences and holds different narrative lines together.