Katherine Anne Porter Quotes

American poetry, like American painting, is always personal with an emphasis on the individuality of the poet.

Even when the poet seems most himself . . . he is never the bundle of accident and incoherence that sits down to breakfast; he has been reborn as an idea, something intended, complete.

I believe that everybody was born with a kind of uniqueness. There is never going to be somebody else with the same DNA as you, with the same experiences. There is something that you were meant to do as an individual. You have some kind of creative skill. It can either be creating your own business in some level, being a writer, an artist, whatever, or it can even be working within a company, but from within that company you're creating something.

For God's sake stop making people in your image. Harry was real. He wasn't just your hero and my lover. He was Harry. He was in a racket. He did bad things. What about it? He was the man we knew.

If you believe you're a poet, then you're saved.

Multitude, solitude: equal and interchangeable terms for the active and prolific poet.

If I am going to be a poet at all, I am going to be POET and not NEGRO POET.

Now begins to rise in me the familiar rhythm; words that have lain dormant now lift, now toss their crests, and fall and rise, and falls again. I am a poet, yes. Surely I am a great poet.

whether they write poems or don't write poems, poets are best.

Every single song has its own individual character and you can't treat each song the same way, because it wants to be treated differently and there are songs that are like scared birds that you have to sneak up on over the course of months in the woods.

The poet is he who inspires, rather than he who is inspired.

Man is a poetical animal, and delights in fiction.

It is no use trying to sum people up.

I have never considered myself a poet. Therefore, I am not a rival of anyone, and I do not consider anybody my rival.

It is clear that we do not exactly choose our poems; our poems choose us.

No one is a poet from eight to twelve and from two to six. Whoever is a poet is one always, and continually assaulted by poetry.

I think it's important to say something. If you're making music it's kinda' like, oh, cool, so is everyone else.

People are too various to be treated so lightly. I am too various to be trusted.

She was made up of more, too. She was the books she read in the library. She was the flower in the brown bowl. Part of her life was made from the tree growing rankly in the yard. She was the bitter quarrels she had with her brother whom she loved dearly. She was Katie's secret, despairing weeping. She was the shame of her father stumbling home drunk. She was all of these things and of something more...It was what God or whatever is His equivalent puts into each soul that is given life - the one different thing such as that which makes no two fingerprints on the face of the earth alike.

If man understood that "what I create has nothing to do with what anybody else is creating" then he wouldn't be so afraid of what others are doing.

I also became a poet, and for one year lived in a Paradise of my own creation; I imagined that I also might obtain a niche in the temple where the names of Homer and Shakespeare are consecrated.

We don't have to live up to the expectations of others. Passion is personal. As long as our passion is fueled with the right stuff then keep on plodding forward. I'll never be Mark Twain or Tom Clancy. But that's okay, because neither of them could teach you to mix a boundless number of grays, or where to place the catch light in a portrait.

You see, I am a poet, and not quite right in the head, darling. It’s only that.

Once I started writing all the time and interacting with poets, I made a conscious decision to identify myself as a poet. It's funny how much a single word can provide focus and direction. As soon as I claimed that identity, I started clearing more and more space for poetry in my life and applying poetic tools to other areas of my life. The world became a different place, and I witnessed it through different kinds of eyes.