Edward Hirsch Quotes

Whether I'm writing scripts or prose, the goal is identical. To give pleasure. Now whether I succeed or not is up for debate, and, mostly, I fail. But I try. I like to make things. It's a way to stay busy during one's ephemeral and confusing life.

There's very little of the intentional about the business of writing poetry, as least as far as I can see.

I think poetry is the best thing I do. It's certainly the purest. I seem to switch gears without too much trouble. Non-fiction is in many ways the easiest to write.

I like to write poetry.

Writing is a combination of intangible creative fantasy and appallingly hard work.

I used to write poems more when I was younger, but I haven't in a long time. I just write ideas and paragraphs and go from there.

The process of writing a poem represents work done on the self of the poet, in order to make form.

Musicians have to suffer to a certain degree in order to obtain their outlet.

I want to write because I have the urge to excel in one medium of translation and expression of life. I can't be satisfied with the colossal job of merely living. Oh, no, I must order life in sonnets and sestinas and provide a verbal reflector for my 60-watt lighted head.

I have always felt like an artist when I work on a book. I see no reason why the word should always be confined to writers of fiction and poetry.

In matters like writing and painting, a man does what he has to do - if he has to write, why then, he writes; and if he doesn't feel the urgent need of writing, there are dozens of professions in which it is easier to earn a comfortable living.

I feel often very close to the ecstasy and anguish which lie at the very heart of poetry - I am writing a lot.

Writing a poem ... is a kind of possible love affair between something like the heart (that courageous but also shy factory of emotion) and the learned skills of the conscious mind.

I think of poetry as something out there in the world and within each of us. I don't mean that everyone can write poetry - it's an art, a craft, it requires enormous commitment like any art. But there's a core of desire in each of us and poetry goes to and comes from that core. It's the social, economic, institutional gap that makes it difficult.

To sum it all up, if you want to write, if you want to create, you must be the most sublime fool that God ever turned out and sent rambling. You must write every single day of your life. You must write dreadful dumb books and glorious books, and let them wrestle in beautiful fights inside your head, vulgar one moment, brilliant the next.

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.

There is something about writing poetry that brings a man close to the cliff's edge.

Good writing isn’t a science. It’s an art, and the horizon is infinite. You can always get better.

Writing does not exclude the full life; it demands it.

I think one of the reasons I'm so thrilled with writing is because it is an act of reading for me at the same time, which is why my revisions are so sustained.

The writing of an assay-type poem or a poem investigating perspective isn't an exercise of rational or strategic mind. Poems for me are acts of small or large desperation. They grapple with surfaces too steep to walk in any other way, yet which have to be traveled.

The twisted circumstances under which we live is grist for the writing mill, the loving, hating and discovering, finding new handles for old pitchers . . .

I gotta pound the keys for the ideas to flow.

A poet's work consists less in seeking words for his ideas than in seeking ideas for his words and predominant rhythms.

This is writing. You cut out chunks of your own memories, rework them, bleed into them, breathe into the raw clay, and hope the creature lives.