Andre Gide Quotes

It is with noble sentiments that bad literature gets written.

Bad literature is a form of treason.

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.

I wrote a book called ‘Dancing The Dream’. It was more autobiographical than Moonwalk, which I did with Mrs. Onassis. It wasn’t full of gossip and scandal and all that trash that people write, so I don’t think people paid much attention to it, but it came from my heart. It was essays, thoughts and things that I’ve thought about while on tour

Many a fervid man writes books as cold and flat as graveyard stones.

If you write beautifully, you write beautifully, that's all.

There are many people who get beat up, who suffer, who are victimized, and then they sit down to write and they write crap. How many of these graphic novels over the years are from really talented people? Most of them actually, if you look at them, are self-pitying confessionals about "poor me".

One day while studying a Yeats poem I decided to write poetry the rest of my life. I recognized that a single short poem has room for history, music, psychology, religious thought, mood, occult speculation, character, and events of one's own life. I still feel surprised that such various substances can find shelter and nourishment in a poem. A poem in fact may be a sort of nourishing liquid, such as one uses to keep an amoeba alive. If prepared right, a poem can keep an image or a thought or insights on history or the psyche alive for years, as well as our desires and airy impulses.

The kind of poetry I write, lyric poetry, I think is really concerned with intimacy, with mystery. That needn't be religious mystery, there are mysteries to do with everyday life.

Re: Robert Montgomery's Poems His writing bears the same relation to poetry which a Turkey carpet bears to a picture. There are colours in the Turkey carpet out of which a picture might be made. There are words in Mr. Montgomery's writing which, when disposed in certain orders and combinations,have made, and will make again, good poetry. But, as they now stand, they seem to be put together on principle in such a manner as to give no image of anything in the heavens above, or in the earth beneath, or in the waters under the earth.

If you're a poet, you do something beautiful. I mean, you're supposed to leave something beautiful after you get off the page and everything. The ones you're talking about don't leave a single, solitary thing beautiful. All that maybe the slightly better ones do is sort of get inside your head and leave something there, but just because they do, just because they know how to leave something, it doesn't have to be a poem for heaven's sake. It may just be some kind of terribly fascinating, syntaxy droppings--excuse the expression. Like Manlius and Esposito and all those poor men.

The finest poetry was first experience.

It requires more than mere genius to be an author.

I still think it's really quite wonderful when I read a sentence of mine and it has that quality of lastingness.

I was one of those dark, quiet kids that wrote poetry.

If I'm not crying while writing a song, I'm not doing it right.

The very essence of literature is the war between emotion and intellect, between life and death. When literature becomes too intellectual - when it begins to ignore the passions, the emotions - it becomes sterile, silly, and actually without substance.

In the hands of a great poet, words have ways of affecting us in ways we don't understand.

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

Just why I sent it to the publishers would be hard to say, but when I had finished it I felt that it was literature, because it is real and because it was well written. And I know that the world wants such things.

I like to write poetry.

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

The crown of literature is poetry.

Even the greatest poets can't express tragedy in a way that is larger than their immediate circumstances.

Jokes that are gratuitously offensive are synonymous with bad writing to me. I'm offended as a writer first and as a person second.