John Hawkes Quotes

The only thing that exists is torment, lyricism, and the magnificence of language.

Poetry is a deal of joy and pain and wonder, with a dash of the dictionary.

The dance is a poem of which each movement is a word.

Well-written words are music.

Poetry is the language we speak in the most terrifying or ecstatic passages of our lives. But the very word poetry scares people. They think of their grade school teachers reciting 'Hiawatha' and they groan.

Lyricists play with words.

You don't have to suffer to be a poet; adolescence is enough suffering for anyone.

What has always attracted me in life is poetry. Any genre can have poetry. For me, poetry contains truth.

Nonfiction speaks to the head. Fiction speaks to the heart. Poetry speaks to the soul. It's the essence of beauty. The essence of pain. It pleases the eye and the ear.

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

Words make love with one another.

We love eloquence for its own sake, and not for any truth which it may utter, or any heroism it may inspire

I think poetry is as old as language, and both come out of the same thing - an effort to try to express something that is inexpressible.

I see magic in conversation and words, and music is purely speaking to others, isn't it?

I think that's what poets try to do: They try to sidestep neurology and go straight to meaning.

I like the idea that songs can communicate in a way no other media can. That's why I write them.

As things get worse, poetry gets better because it becomes more necessary.

I'm the complete technique of rhyme. I don't have no boundaries.

Poetry is music though, unfortunately, not all music is poetry. Because music has other carriers to take its message - beats, lyrics, singers, bass players - anyone in music can rise to make a major statement but in poetry there are only words to do the work. And they do sometimes have to sweat.

Art never comes from happiness.

Poems don't have to rhyme... Poems are about beauty and emotion; in other words poems are about feelings.

Words are my passion / And out of them and me / I would create beauty.

Language is, in other words, not necessary, but voluntary. If it were necessary, it would have stayed simple; it would not agitate our hearts with ever-present loveliness and ever-cresting ambiguity; it would not dream, on its long white bones, of turning into song.

All of life in its complexity and beauty is forever minted in the gold of words.

It is interesting to note that poetry, a literary device whose very construct involves the use of words, is itself the word of choice by persons grasping to describe something so beautiful it is marvelously ineffable.