Bill Callahan Quotes

Poetry is a special use of language that opens onto the real. The business of the poet is truth telling, which is why in the Celtic tradition no one could be a teacher unless he or she was a poet.

The object of poetic activity is essentially language: whatever his beliefs and convictions, the poet is more concerned with words than with what these words designate.

A novelist can get by on story, but the poet has nothing but the words.

I'm a failed poet. Reading poetry helps me to see the world differently, and I try to infuse my prose with figurative language, which goes against the trend in fiction.

All my stories are webs of style and none seems at first blush to contain much kinetic matter. For me style is matter.

Lapped in poetry, wrapped in the picturesque, armed with logical sentences and inalienable words.

Poetry is the exquisite expression of exquisite expressions.

You take stuff from different places, and sometimes you stick a line in because it rhymes, not because it makes sense.

You don't make a poem with ideas, but with words.

I've been interested in writing and storytelling since I learned to read, but it wasn't until I read Dylan Thomas, when I was 14, that I became interested in language itself, and saw it as more than a transparent medium for a story.

It's not easy to define poetry.

I've read some of your modern free verse and wonder who set it free.

I guess I find the boundaries between poetry and prose to be somewhat permeable.

I like poems that are complex.

It should here be added that poetry habitually takes the form of verse.

Poetry, almost by definition, calls attention to its language and form.

I like the way words go together and I like the gamesmanship of writing poetry. It is such a challenge.

I studied poetry in college and for a year in an MFA program. As time went on, my poems got more and more complicated. What I was really trying to do was tell stories.

People think of poetry as a school subject... Poetry is very frustrating to students because they don't have a taste for ambiguity, for one thing. That gives them a poetry hangover.

I wish our clever young poets would remember my homely definitions of prose and poetry; that is, prose = words in their best order; - poetry = the best words in the best order.

There was a period in my life when I was very young that I wrote a sonnet a day just to learn concision in writing.

When I first began writing, it was not in screenwriting but in poetry. That form was so evocative, all about the image and the emotion captured in a Polaroid-like smattering of words.

I was lucky to have read a lot of poetry when I was younger; it helped me to remember a way to write.

When I write, I write everything from a rhythm point.

But poetry is my life. Poetry is what matters to me.