Karl Kraus Quotes

Translation is an interestingly different way to be involved both with poetry and with the language that I've found myself living in much of the time. I think the two feed each other.

I think every person is so unique. I think every woman is so unique, every man is so unique, every artist is so unique.

Poetry is essentially the discovery, the love, the passion for the name of everything.

There's nothing in the world for which a poet will give up writing, not even he is a Jew and the language of his poems is German.

Fiction is of the essence of poetry as well as of painting; there is a resemblance in one of human bodies, things, and actions which are not real, and in the other of a true story by fiction.

Poetry is the honey of all flowers, the quintessence of all sciences, the marrow of wit, and the very phrase of angels.

Poets are far rarer birds than kings.

We've all got an identity. You can't avoid it. It's what's left when you take everything else away.

... an artist is a person first. He is an individual. If there is no person, there is no artist.

Literature is always something - it is either story or poetry, ideally both. That is, you always know what it is and even if the interpretation is not available, the experience of language is.

However, as words become particularized, and as men begin - in however small a way - to use them in personal, arbitrary ways, so their transformation into art begins. It was words of this kind that, descending on me like a swarm of winged insects, seized on my individuality and sought to shut me up within it. Nevertheless, despite the enemy's depredations upon my person, I turned their universality - at once a weapon and a weakness - back on them, and to some extent succeeded in using words to universalize to my own individuality.

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.

It's a little mad, but I believe I am many people. When I am writing a poem, I feel I am the person who should have written it.

Poetry, therefore, we will call Musical Thought.

I tell poets that when a line just floats into your head, don't pay attention 'cause it probably has floated into somebody else's head.

Poetry is a natural energy resource of our country.

Poetry is one of the essential structures of civilization - carrying myth, ritual, 'tales of the tribe' and the essence of language.

For poetry the idea is everything; the rest is a world of illusion.

When you really do feel like an alien, and you really do feel like a space creature, and you really do feel you want to experiment and dress up and be different every day, to find what looks best but never stick to one thing... Just the fact that that was offered to those kids during that time is pretty remarkable.

A lot of innovation in language comes from poetry.

We are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself.

The essence of a sound style is that it cannot be reduced to rules-that it is a living and breathing thing with something of the devilish in it-that it fits its proprietor tightly yet ever so loosely, as his skin fits him. It is, in fact, quite as seriously an integral part of him as that skin is. . . . In brief, a style is always the outward and visible symbol of a man, and cannot be anything else.

As far as I can tell, there are two kinds of poets: those who want to tell stories and sing songs, and those who want to work out the chemical equation for language and pass on their experiments as poetry.

For Poesy alone can tell her dreams, With the fine spell of words alone can save Imagination from the sable charm And dumb enchantment. Who alive can say, ‘Thou art no Poet may’st not tell thy dreams?’ Since every man whose soul is not a clod Hath visions, and would speak, if he had loved And been well nurtured in his mother tongue. Whether the dream now purpos’d to rehearse Be poet’s or fanatic’s will be known When this warm scribe my hand is in the grave.

What is originality? It is being one's self, and reporting accurately what we see and are.