Eugene Ionesco Quotes

I beg your pardon: correct English is the slang of prigs who write history and essays. And the strongest slang of all is the slang of poets.

Anyone who undertakes the literary grind had better like playing around with words.

Well, I like to write poetry. I'm a published poet.

I welcome new words, or old words used in new ways, provided the result is more precision, added color or greater expressiveness.

Everyone is not able, or inclined, to write poetry in the narrower sense any more than everyone is qualified to take part in a walking race. But just as all of us can and do walk, so all of us can and do use language poetically.

There are no poetic ideas; only poetic utterances.

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.

Can one invent verbs? I want to tell you one: I sky you, so my wings extend so large to love you without measure.

The reader is the content of any poem or of the language he employs, and in order to use any of these forms, he must put them on.

I really came to literature through poetry.

I've coined new words, like, misunderstanding and "Hispanically".

'Refudiate,' 'misunderestimate,' 'wee-wee'd up.' English is a living language. Shakespeare liked to coin new words too. Got to celebrate it!'

The great modern heresy in poetry is to confuse the use we make of words in a poem with modalities of speech...For true poetry is never speech but always a song.

The bold and discerning writer who, recognizing the truth that language must grow by innovation if it grow at all, makes new words and uses the old in an unfamiliar sense has no following and is tartly reminded that 'it isn't in the dictionary' - although down to the time of the first lexicographer no author ever had used a word that was in the dictionary.

Poetry is creative expression; Prose is constructive expression... by creative I mean original. In Poetry the words are born or reborn in the act of thinking... There is no time interval between the words and the thought when a real poet writes, both of them happen together, and both the thought and the word are Poetry.

Poets... are literal-minded men who will squeeze a word till it hurts.

Is there no room for art in the spoken language? What is the use of creating an unnatural language to the exclusion of the natural one?

Every word was once a poem.

Somebody once said that the Irish derived the greatest benefit from the English language. They court it like a beautiful woman. They make it bray with donkey laughter, they fling it at the sky like paint pots full of rainbow colors.

Writing does not resurrect. It buries.

There is no point where art so nearly touches nature as when it appears in the form of words.

A really good stand-up comic is a poet; it's about the use of language. It can be really poetic. And I like politically conscious comedy.

I often recall these words when I am writing, and I think to myself, “It’s true. There aren’t any new words. Our job is to give new meanings and special overtones to absolutely ordinary words.” I find the thought reassuring. It means that vast, unknown stretches still lie before us, fertile territories just waiting for us to cultivate them.

The poets are the standard bearers of language. Their work lives or dies word by word. When I write and can hear a clunky sentence, I try to write up to the poetry that I have recited beforehand.

Words are always getting conventionalized to some secondary meaning. It is one of the works of poetry to take the truants in custody and bring them back to their right senses.