Viggo Mortensen Quotes

You don't become a poet if you want to make any money.

I had written children's books for 14 years before I published 'Wicked.' And none of them were poorly reviewed, and none of them sold enough for me to be able to buy a bed.

There is poetry even in prose, in all the great prose which is not merely utilitarian or didactic: there exist poets who write in prose or at least in more or less apparent prose; millions of poets write verses which have no connection with poetry.

I'm a poet, and I spent my life in poetry.

The figure a poem makes. It begins in delight and ends in wisdom... in a clarification of life - not necessarily a great clarification, such as sects and cults are founded on, but in a momentary stay against confusion.

This proves that great lyric poetry can die, be reborn, die again, but will always remain one of the most outstanding creations of the human soul.

My intention is to write poems. That's what I've been doing most of my life.

I've been writing poetry seriously since about 2008, 2009.

I had a million jobs before I managed to make a living out of poetry.

In the family, writing wasn't anything anyone understood - being a writer in the real world? How could it be? We didn't have those mirrors.

Sometime early in life, I developed the notion - one which I have never relinquished - that writing a novel is the very finest thing a person can do.

I read poetry every day. I look at it as an exercise, a kind of T'ai Chi for writers. It teaches economy of form.

I hoped to be able to write a novel which would enable me to live on it while I wrote the next.

To be a working writer is the holy grail, where you don't have three other jobs on top of that.

I've always liked to write, but I never thought I could make a career out of it.

I'm the weird poet who has paid her dues in the experimental world for 30 or 40 years.

I was pushing for a career in poetry and of course the received wisdom was that you would never make a living at it.

I wanted to become a writer and felt that poetry was perfected language, so having it in my subconscious mind would make the music of language always available to me.

I don't have time for language poetry anymore. I don't want to throw people off anymore.

I have certain viewpoints that come out in certain shayaris.

Poets are supposed to be underappreciated, don't you know? There is always a strange reaction to those who become successful in their own lifetime, and so I always felt lucky that I made the living I did out of it.

I love poetry and I've kept everything I've written.

I moved to California in 2011 to be a writer. A family friend told me to take acting classes so I could do commercials and actually make a little money.

I was at Harvard with a whole bunch of poets, and that was very rare. They published a lot of books because there was an excitement after the war that translated into poetry.

I have been writing poetry for a long time now. I started writing in my school days.