Chuck Jones Quotes

The writer is always tricking the reader into listening to their dream.

A writer is someone who can make a riddle out of an answer.

Fiction is the truth inside the lie.

I keep trying to define 'poetry,' but it's so difficult.

Fiction is a house with many stately mansions, but also one in which it is wise, at least sometimes, to swing from the chandeliers.

Two fundamental literary qualities: supernaturalism and irony.

In poetry, you must love the words, the ideas and the images and rhythms with all your capacity to love anything at all.

I try not to be overly literal. When I'm writing songs, I write down a lot of words, and then I try to simplify it. I like to give people hints or words that make visual pictures for them.

Poetry is not a matter of feelings, it is a matter of language. It is language which creates feelings.

Jigging veins of rhyming mother wits.

I like to play with tropes.

A novel wouldn't be a book if there weren't some flights of fancy on the part of the author, stopping time to examine things, or to tell a joke.

Poetry is always slightly mysterious, and you wonder what is your relationship to it.

The laws of literature, like the laws of gossip, usually demand exaggeration, decontextualization, a heightened or minimalized reality, and a lot more shape and order and impact than everyday life.

Poets are always ahead of things in a certain way, their sense of language and their vision.

I love playing with words and texture.

If we ask a vague question, such as, 'What is poetry?' we expect a vague answer, such as, 'Poetry is the music of words,' or 'Poetry is the linguistic correction of disorder.'

Poetry is the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits.

Poetry is ordinary language raised to the Nth power. Poetry is boned with ideas, nerved and blooded with emotions, all held together by the delicate, tough skin of words.

Poetry is the art of creating imaginary gardens with real toads.

Poetry can do a lot of things to people. I mean it can improve your imagination. It can take you to new places. It can give you this incredible form of verbal pleasure.

I usually don't like to 'spoon feed' my audience, because I grew up idolizing story tellers who tell stories using symbolism, so it was in my nature to do the same.

I love reading poetry, and yet, at this point, the thought of writing a poem, to me, is tantamount to figuring out a trigonometry question.

I enjoy the inventive ways in which language is manipulated to make meaning.

Like all novelists, I'm interested in the filters between reality and the imagination.