George Murray Quotes

In a way you can feel that the poet actually is looking over your shoulder, and you say to yourself, now, how would this go for him? Would this do or not?

At the end of the day, I'm writing in a genre that isn't highly regarded.

All that's left now is purely poetic work, putting more life into individual places, as I've made so sure of the fundamental mood and dimension of expression that it won't leave me groping around in uncertainty any more.

Gregory Corso used to get really pissed when people called Bob Dylan a 'poet.' After writing poetry for a few years, I can understand that.

You perhaps know me as a novelist. Literature is one of the arts - in fact, the noblest of the arts. That is not my opinion; it was first expressed by the ancients. As art, literature has many similarities with the other art forms.

Give a critic an inch, he'll write a play.

Writers are notoriously unable to know about themselves. Faulkner thought 'The Fable' was his best novel. F. Scott Fitzgerald liked 'Tender Is the Night,' an experimental novel.

We sometimes received - and I would read - 200 manuscripts a week. Some of them were wonderful, some were terrible; most were mediocre. It was like the gifts of the good and bad fairies.

No verse can give pleasure for long, nor last, that is written by drinkers of water.

Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamp-post what it feels about dogs.

No poems can please for long or live that are written by water drinkers.

Literature, of course, is not a contest.

I am not Shakespeare or Hemingway, but I have written stories on tennis that were brilliant.

If it is an imperfect word, no external circumstance can heighten its value as poetry.

When I look at the arc of my career, my focus is on lyricism, right? I own that.

One of the disconcerting things about writing for publication is that you're trying to clear your little parcel of land in a field where Taste is king - and, as we all know, there's no accounting for Taste.

Poetry is a pure meritocracy. There's no room for ambiguity: either a poem moves you and opens up new vistas in life, or it doesn't. It's completely objective, and the best always rise to the top.

Shakespeare often writes so ill that you hesitate to believe he could ever write supremely well; or, if this way of putting it seem indecorous and abominable, he very often writes so well that you are loth to believe he could ever have written thus extremely ill.

A good novel is a good novel, pointe finale. And I think what I'm writing is exactly that.

I aspire to write what are called 'familiar essays.' They begin in the personal and end in the universal. It's not for me to say if I have been successful at it. But that is the hope.

As for how criticism of Keats' poetry relates to criticism of my own work, I'll leave that for others to decide.

Every good poet includes a critic, but the reverse is not true.

A lot of people feel that the realm of poetry and the realm of the lyric is personal feeling and should rise above politics, which, in fact, good poetry has never done.

It's sour grapes, I admit, I want to be more famous so people are examining my work couplet by couplet, you know what I mean? That's the level where I want to go.

I'm very good at plot.