Steve Toltz Quotes

There are things which some people never attempt during their whole lives, but one of these is not poetry. Poetry attacks all human beings sooner or later, and, like the measles, is mild or violent according to the age of the sufferer.

To be a poet did not occur to me. It was indeed a threshold guarded by demons.

I hardly remember how I started to write poetry. It's hard to imagine what I thought poetry could do.

I'm conscious of a series of circles working its way through my life. And at this particular moment I have come round to the beginning of my writing cycle. It begins with poetry. There's hardly a day that goes past on which I don't write poetry.

What inspires a poem for me is usually a moment.

Like a pianist runs her fingers over the keys, I'll search my mind for what to say. Now, the poem may want you to write it. And then sometimes you see a situation and think, 'I'd like to write about that.' Those are two different ways of being approached by a poem, or approaching a poem.

I've always tried to be a poet more than anything else. I mean, professional musicians die.

I love to write. I have always loved writing. That was my first love.

I always turn to Frank O'Hara and David Berman's 'Actual Air,' which came out in 1999. He's a poet I haven't tired of.

I've written poetry most of my life.

I've always felt that the poems I've written which have historical context are hopefully not just simply plucking something out of history and saying great, let's write about that. In every case what has happened is that I've become fascinated or haunted by something and couldn't shake it.

There is no such thing as a secure writer: every novel is an impossible mountain.

Nothing so difficult as a beginning In poesy, unless perhaps the end.

And when you are entering into poetry, whatever stage you're at, you are participating in something with a very long and noble tradition.

To me Art (poetry) is a continuous and continuing process and that when a man fails to write good poetry he fails to live fully or well.

If you want to write anything that works, you have to go with the grain of your talent, not against it. If your talent is inert and sullen in the face of business or politics...but takes fire at the thought of ghosts and vampires and witches and demons then feed the flames, feed the flames.

Reading yields a wish to write, I think, except if the reading is dull and uninspiring.

This is the gift all writers seek-to write language that incandesces yet does not melt.

Critics write out of intellectual exercise, not poets. Poets write straight from the heart.

It occurred to me that I would like to be a poet. The chief qualification, I understand is that you must be born. Well, I hunted up my birth certificate, and found that I was all right on that score.

For me, poetry is a way of thinking, and like many poets, I'm driven by the idea of trying to find the impossible, perfect words: the words that will hold my subject.

Most people are much better at saying things in letters than in conversation, and some people can write artistic, inventive letters, but when they try a poem or story or novel they become pretentious.

I haven't written poetry in a long time but I read it and I miss it. It is so hard to write. So hard to finish, so hard to find the exact word to make it shine. In honor of my youth I will write a poem to finish this essay. It is spring in the Ozark Mountains. The yellow flowers are blooming and the birds wake me at dawn and last night five planets lined up by the moon in the western sky. If that doesn't inspire me to poetry what will?

Writing... is an act of faith: I believe it's also an act of hope, the hope that things can get better than they are.

Write for pleasure and publish for money.