Salvatore Quasimodo Quotes

If you know what you are going to write when you're writing a poem, it's going to be average.

What has any poet to trust more than the feel of the thing? Theory concerns him only until he picks up his pen, and it begins to concern him again as soon as he lays it down.

It's hard to write a song about reality because reality doesn't rhyme.

My opinion is that a poet should express the emotion of all the ages and the thought of his own.

Let me read you some of my poetry. My poetry just takes me to another level.

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.

The business of the poet is not to find new emotions, but to use the ordinary ones and, in working them up into poetry, to express feelings which are not in actual emotions at all.

A novel is never anything, but a philosophy put into images.

I love the feeling of creating pictures in someone's mind just by spelling out the right lyrical combination.

And if they haven't got poetry in them, there's nothing you can do that will produce it.

But I can only write what the muse allows me to write. I cannot choose, I can only do what I am given, and I feel pleased when I feel close to concrete poetry - still.

I'm an amalgam of the 19th-century romantics and the beat poets.

In my mind's eye, Shakespeare is a huge, hot sea-beast, with fire in his veins and ice on his claws and inscrutable eyes, who looks like an inchoate hump under the encrustations of live barnacle-commentaries, limpets and trailing weeds.

I developed a definition - which I think becomes less and less accurate as poetry moves into the world - that poetry was a way of speaking to the world, but fiction was a way to get the world to speak to me.

The good poet sticks to his real loves, those within the realm of possibility. He never tries to hold hands with God or the human race.

Fiction isn't made by scraping the bones of topicality for the last shreds and sinews, to be processed into mechanically recovered prose. Like journalism, it deals in ideas as well as facts, but also in metaphors, symbols and myths.

In those days, it didn't take much imagination to come up with something that required great lyric development skills. You just thought of an experience that you might have gone through, and write it down.

I don't think poetry is something that can be taught. We can encourage young writers, but what you can't teach them is the very essence of poetry.

I think fiction is a very serious thing, that while it is fiction, it is also a revelation of truth, or facts.

I was always making up rhymes. But I never thought that poetry would become my life.

Poetry is a plan for a slit in the face of a bronze fountain goat and the path of fresh drinking water.

Sci-fi's great, but you don't have to hit people over the head with it when you're making a social comment. It just inherently exists within the fabric of the story.

'Singing Saw' was exactly seeing through my eyes; 'City Music' let me write from somebody else's perspective, somebody living in New York.

Fiction allows us to both evade truth and to approach it - or, rather, it's fiction that allows us to 'construct' our world. It's haunted by the unimaginable and the unspeakable.

People think you have to go through something to write about it, and you absolutely do not. You can write about, like, a shoe. It's a story.