Mary Oliver Quotes

I like connecting the abstract to the concrete. There's a tension in that. I believe the reader or listener should be able to enter the poem as a participant. So I try to get past resolving poems.

If the book is a mystery to its author as she's writing, inevitably it's going to be a mystery to the reader as he or she reads it.

What any writer hopes for is that the reader will stick with you to the end of the contract and that there is a level of submission on the reader's part.

I tend to like poems that engage me - that is to say, which do not bore me.

I like the eclipses, the synaptic jumps of short stories. The reader has to participate very actively in the experience.

We're not keen on the idea of the story sharing its valence with the reader. But the reader's own life 'outside' the story changes the story.

Of course a poem is a two-way street. No poem is any good if it doesn't suggest to the reader things from his own mind and recollection that he will read into it, and will add to what the poet has suggested. But I do think poetry readings are very important.

I like a film that makes the audience feel like they are in the middle of life as it is moving, and in a way, they are catching up. They are thrown into things.

Almost anything is too much. I am trying in my poems to have the reader be the experiencer. I do not want to be there. It is not even a walk we take together.

We simply have not kept in touch with poetry.

A reader is not supposed to be aware that someone's written the story. He's supposed to be completely immersed, submerged in the environment.

But I care about the reader, and I'm trying to keep the reader's attention for as long as I can.

Humor, for me, is really a gate of departure. It's a way of enticing a reader into a poem so that less funny things can take place later. It really is not an end in itself, but a means to an end.

I'm very aware of the presence of a reader, and that probably is a reaction against a lot of poems that I do read which seem oblivious to my presence as a reader.

What you look for as a reader is somebody who is going to take you and say, 'C'mon. Come into the story. I'm going to show you what there is to see.' The guide who is going to tell you, 'Pay attention over there,' or, 'Do you remember that other thing? Now watch!'

I refuse to make films where the audience comes for consumption. I make films where you know you are also part of the process.

Invite the reader to participate by deciphering. Chaos can attract and engage.

If books could have more, give more, be more, show more, they would still need readers who bring to them sound and smell and light and all the rest that can’t be in books. The book needs you.

It is hard to write about physically difficult things without causing the reader to disengage.

Readers are less and less seen as mere non-writers, the subhuman "other" or flawed derivative of the author; the lack of a pen is no longer a shameful mark of secondary status but a positively enabling space, just as within every writer can be seen to lurk, as a repressed but contaminating antithesis, a reader.

The success of the poem is determined not by how much the poet felt in writing it, but by how much the reader feels in reading it.

Description is what makes the reader a sensory participant in the story.

Fiction keeps its audience by retaining the world as its subject matter. People like the world. Many people actually prefer it to art and spend their days by choice in the thick of it.

It's important to me that the reader goes on a ride with the characters, that you set context enough to know, "Okay, here's where we are in the world. Now we're just going to go inside this person's head, this guy's heart, this woman's ambitions and take it down to very, very small scale."

One doesn't read poetry while thinking of other things.