Stephen Dunn Quotes

No one will ever know how many novels, poems, analyses, confessions, sufferings and joys have been piled up on this continent called Love, without it ever having turned out to be totally investigated.

I tell myself I write because I want to say something true and original about the nature of evil. That is very ambitious - to say something about the human condition that hasn't been written before. Probably I will never succeed but that is what I strive to do.

Writing is.... being able to take something whole and fiercely alive that exists inside you in some unknowable combination of thought, feeling, physicality, and spirit, and to then store it like a genie in tense, tiny black symbols on a calm white page. If the wrong reader comes across the words, they will remain just words. But for the right readers, your vision blooms off the page and is absorbed into their minds like smoke, where it will re-form, whole and alive, fully adapted to its new environment.

As a writer, you explore all kinds of different emotions.

Poetry is, above all, an approach to the truth of feeling.

The truly great writer does not want to write: he wants the world to be a place in which he can live the life of the imagination. The first quivering word he puts to paper is the word of the wounded angel: pain.

Writing is a combination of being alert to your outer surroundings and alive to your inner reality.

Whenever I write, I only write about what I know or what I have experienced or feeling.

We write from life and call it literature, and literature lives because we are in it.

The very impulse to write springs from an inner chaos crying for order - for meaning.

I think the songs I was writing after Aeroplane were full of a lot of undealt-with pain that was just a little too big... the issues seemed too large for me to confront intuitively through songwriting. I kept pushing it and pushing it. There are so many issues about being human and why people inflict pain on each other. There were seeds of all these things I hadn't dealt with. With just the personal issues, I felt I was in over my head, but then to write about it... To write you have to have at least a little bit of confidence you know what you're talking about.

I'm not interested in writers who are overcome with certainty, with single-mindedness, or with a sense of how consistent and morally upstanding they are. My writers are in the thick of it and they seek the truth, rather than embody it, and sometimes they find truths that don't sit palatably or easily together. That's life. That's personality. And that's writing.

It's just writing about things, feelings, not that we're dark or depressed...just as much as anyone else is.

I feel like success to me is about feeling like I have done something in storytelling, where I've gotten close to articulating something intangible that I'm feeling, and I think I get closer every time, but I don't know that I've done that yet.

God preserve us from writers who regurgitate what they have learnt from books! It is people's secrets we want to know - it is the natural history of the human heart that we have been trying to put down for a thousand years and everyone must and can leave their contribution.

Art and psychoanalysis give shape and meaning to life and that is why we adore them, but life as it is lived has no shape and meaning.

Make up a story... For our sake and yours forget your name in the street; tell us what the world has been to you in the dark places and in the light. Don't tell us what to believe, what to fear. Show us belief's wide skirt and the stitch that unravels fear's caul.

The whole race is a poet that writes down / The eccentric propositions of its fate.

I got a damn good mind to write a book about all the feelings that I have inside about all these things that happened in our life that we're making happen and letting it happen when it shouldn't be happening.

the story is not a pretty one. there is violence in it. And cruelty. But stories that are not pretty have a certain value, too, I suppose. Everything, as you well know (having lived in this world long enough to have figured out a thing or two for yourself), cannont always be sweetness and light.

The universe of poetry is the universe of emotional truth. Our material is in the way we feel and the way we remember.

My tidiness, and my untidiness, are full of regret and remorse and complex feelings.

We stalk the truth as poets, sensualists, a duality, limited insanity. We labor in our muse, carving alphabets of experience into our hearts.

I try not to write songs. I would rather emote them, and I found myself going back to my room every night while on my trip, just pouring out new songs and new stories about what I was seeing, what I was feeling.