Clive James Quotes

You can't be too influenced by a great poet. You simply have to live through it.

Pound's translation of Chinese poetry was maybe the most important thing I read. Eliot a little bit later.

I didn't want to be like Yeats; I wanted to be Yeats.

Elizabeth Bishop in particular had a big impact on me personally as well as artistically. Her insistence on clarity is something I rate very highly.

Bob Dylan is out of the mentorship of Allen Ginsberg.

What is ironic is that Allen Ginsberg's importance was in its twilight for so many years that it took his death to bring it to the front page. He electrified an entire world!

We're trying to make something that lasts in language and there's no question that many fiction writers began as poets and it's hard for me to think of any good fiction writers who don't also read poetry.

I'm not sure there's a difference between books that affected the way I see the world and books that influenced me as a writer.

I don't think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right order, you can nudge the world a little or make a poem which children will speak for you when you're dead.

The books I read, if they intrude on my writing, do so as weather will pass through and touch a landscape - affecting it, yes, but only now and then leaving a permanent mark.

I've always been a fan of poetry. I grew up with Lawrence Ferlinghetti and the Beat poets. I really followed that stuff for a while. I just love the way people threw words around like they were painting.

The poet may be used as a barometer, but let us not forget that he is also part of the weather.

When I was growing up, a lot of books affected me, but I never wrote letters to the author or anything like that. I'm always mindful that there are probably a whole bunch of people reading my books like that, too.

The saintly poet was without knowing it, the first radical and the first communist of his century.

My earliest influence was Shakespeare - I read Shakespeare incessantly as a kid.

I've come to think of Dunnett as the literary equivalent of the Velvet Underground; Not many people bought the books, but everyone who did wrote a novel.

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.

Piece by piece I sent my first book of poems to American Poetry Review and was rejected one by one.

Find a poet whose style you like, emulate that style, then deal with things that you know about - don't waste your time looking for your own style.' I wish I could remember who told me that, because I'd like to congraulate him. I've emulated all the old guys - Tennyson, Alexander Pope.

When it comes to poetry, I think partly the numbers of people attempting to write poems is probably a result or the reaction to technology.

It's a common notion that if you like Tagore, then he must have had an influence on your life. While I like Tagore's poetry and his thoughts, he doesn't influence my work.

You must continue. Poets are the ones who change the world.

I remember coming upon Philip Larkin in my 20s in the early '60s and when Sylvia Plath's "Ariel" came out it knocked me off my feet.

Shakespeare was of us, Milton was of us, Burns, Shelley, were with us. They watch from their graves!

Byron owed the vast influence which he exercised over his contemporaries at least as much to his gloomy egotism as to the real power of his poetry.