Pablo Neruda Quotes

Whenever I try to do anything on a typewriter, it's like having this machine between me and the words; what comes out is not quite what would come out if I were scribbling.

Writing has always had that tactile quality for me. It's a physical experience.

My earliest poems were a way of talking to somebody. I suppose to myself.

All I'm about is just the pen.

Remember technology does not make good work. You can still write a poem on a brown paper bag, and haiku is just as profound as the pyramids.

Poetry expands the senses and keeps them in prime condition. It keeps you aware of your nose, your eye, your ear, your tongue, your hand.

The ability to name poetry's gestures and rhetorics isn't required to write or read them, any more than a painter needs to know the physics of color to bring forward a landscape. The eye and hand and ear know what they need to know. Some of us want to know more, because knowing pleases.

Poetry is what makes my toenails twinkle.

I am a creature of my pen. My pen is the best of me.

I write description in longhand because that's hardest for me and you're closer to the paper when you work by hand, but I use the typewriter for dialogue because people speak like a typewriter works.

The Poet binds together by passion and knowledge the vast empire of human society.

I'm not typing. I write only by longhand. I've always written first drafts by hand and then once I was into a second or third draft I wrote insert pages on a typewriter. But I got rid of all my typewriters about three or four novels ago and now I do everything by hand. I write by hand because it makes me go slow and going slow is what I like.

A pen connects you to the paper. It definitely matters.

Be encouraged. Your heart is writing a poem on the world and it's being turned into a thousand songs.

Poetry has in a way been my bridge to my acting career. I had so many questions about my life, so I took to poetry to express my questions. I had questions about politics, family relationships, and more.

To say that a writer's hold on reality is tenuous is an understatement-it's like saying the Titanic had a rough crossing. Writer's build their own realities, move into them and occasionally send letters home. The only difference between a writer and a crazy person is that a writer gets paid for it.

I am fully intelligent only when I write. I have a certain amount of small-change intelligence, which I carry round with me as, at any rate in a town, one has to carry small money, for the needs of the day, the non-writing day. But it seems to me I seldom purely think ... if I thought more I might write less.

Poetry is a peerless proficiency of the imagination.

I would like a simple life / yet all night I am laying / poems away in a long box.

You write something and there’s no reality to it. You can’t inject it with any kind of reality. You have to be patient and keep going, and then, one day, you can feel something signaling to you from the innermost recesses. Like a little person trapped under the rubble of an earthquake. And very, very, very slowly you find your way toward the little bit of living impulse.

My question is "when did other people give up the idea of being a poet?" You know, when we are kids we make up things, we write, and for me the puzzle is not that some people are still writing, the real question is why did the other people stop?

Perhaps I wasn't going crazy after all. Perhaps I was just becoming a writer.

Artists are nearest God. Into their souls he breathes his life, and from their hands it comes in fair, articulate forms to bless the world.

And for so long, I had thought if I was going to write a song, or get "into" something, I had to at least smoke a joint or something. And that didn't work anymore. Once I was fairly well cleaned out, even a little bit of a drug getting into my work threw me off kilter.

Not everyone who drinks is a poet. Some of us drink because we're not poets.