Tony Harrison Quotes

Ideas come from ordinary, everyday life. And from imagination. And from feelings. And from memories. Memories of dust in my sneakers and humming whitewalls down a hill called Monkey.

Memory has always been fundamental for me. In fact, remembering what I had forgotten is the way most of the poems get started.

I wrote my first song when I was six or seven, a silly little song. But I used to write poems in high school - not songs.

There was a singer-songwriter who slept on our couch for a year when I was about 7 or 8. She used to sing these songs for us, and I loved it. It was magical to watch her.

I grew up in this town, my poetry was born between the hill and the river, it took its voice from the rain, and like the timber, it steeped itself in the forests.

Fogs are like dreams that feed the soul, and without their mysterious embrace, childhood, courtship, poetry and the composition of music become all the more difficult.

Women make us poets, children make us philosophers.

I think the reason I'm a writer is because first, I was a reader. I loved to read. I read a lot of adventure stories and mystery books, and I have wonderful memories of my mom reading picture books aloud to me. I learned that words are powerful.

I think more influential than Emily Dickinson or Coleridge or Wordsworth on my imagination were Warner Brothers, Merrie Melodies, and Loony Tunes cartoons.

Storybooks were always a big part of my imagination, and my childhood and adolescence.

Fire—without hatred.

I'm not like a professional writer with professional skills. Songs kind of come into my head the same way they did when I was a kid. I say I'm an overgrown kindergarten kid. I work on songs.

People called me Cilla when I was little because I was always singing and writing poems.

I think the coming of spring, the stars overhead, the first snowfall and so on are gifts for a child, a young poet.

I have more questions than answers in this world as do most poets and writers. The field of memory we exist in is absolutely encompassing and is both a question and answer. It is memory that provides the heart with impetus, fuels the brain, and propels the corn plant from seed to fruit.

The death of childhood is the beginning of poetry.

And of poetry, the success is not attained when it lulls and satisfies, but when it astonishes and fires us with new endeavours after the unattainable.

The greatest poets are those with memories so great that they extend beyond their strongest experiences to their minutest observations of people and things far outside their own self-centeredness.

A strong experience in the present awakens in the creative writer a memory of an earlier experience (usually belonging to his childhood) from which there now proceeds a wish which finds its fulfilment in the creative work.

You can't make poetry out of thought; poetry is passion. Linear thought must be seduced by wild mind, by the fires of ecstasy.

We should use our imagination more than our memory.

My question is "when did other people give up the idea of being a poet?" You know, when we are kids we make up things, we write, and for me the puzzle is not that some people are still writing, the real question is why did the other people stop?

I've got magic. I've got poetry at my fingertips.

Throughout my life, I've been gratified that I've been able to keep the child in me alive and inspire others.

There are in this world two kinds of natures, - those that have wings, and those that have feet, - the winged and the walking spirits. The walking are the logicians; the winged are the instinctive and poetic.