Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Quotes

I wish our clever young poets would remember my homely definitions of prose and poetry; that is, prose = words in their best order; - poetry = the best words in the best order.

Poetry, I'm often told, is something made of words. I think it really goes the other way around: words are made of poetry.

Poetry is the capture of a picture, a song, or a flair, in a deliberate prism of words.

I don't pretend reality is the same for everyone.

It’s not the word made flesh we want in writing, in poetry and fiction, but the flesh made word

Every mind has another vision of reality. There is not a common reality. Every person thinks he is like the others, but every person is different, living in his own psychology.

What we experience is our own concept of things. That is why no two people see quite the same world, and why, in many cases, different people see such different worlds. To put it another way, we make our own world by the way in which we think; for we really do live in a world of our own thoughts.

A good song to one person could just be something mediocre to somebody else. It's always strange thinking about how songs connect with people.

No two people will ever see or feel things in the same way, Merry. The challenge is to be truthful when you write. Don't approximate. Don't settle for the easiest combination of words. Go searching instead for those that explain exactly what you think. What you feel.

I don't think there's any essential difference, at least for me, between writing poetry and writing prose.

We can only connect the dots we collect, which makes everything you write about you... your connections are the thread that you weave into the cloth that becomes the story that only you can tell.

Thought must be hidden in the verse like nutritional virtue in a fruit.

Maybe each human being lives in a unique world, a private world, a world different from those inhabited and experienced by all other humans.

Write what you know will always be excellent advice for those who ought not to write at all. Write what you think, what you imagine, what you suspect!

The subject of the poem usually dictates the rhythm or the rhyme and its form. Sometimes, when you finish the poem and you think the poem is finished, the poem says, "You're not finished with me yet," and you have to go back and revise, and you may have another poem altogether. It has its own life to live.

Poetry is ordinary language raised to the Nth power.

You may derive thoughts from others; your way of thinking, the mould in which your thoughts are cast, must be your own.

It’s almost just a difference of mood as to whether I would describe myself one way or the other. I think I share that experience with most people.

People think they know the mystery of living in your skin. They don't. There's no one who knows except the person who carts it around her own self.

Some of our writers are starting to incorporate elements of social media, etc. in the work itself, which is all for the good, I think - finding new ways of being poetic.

When a poem doesn't work, the first question to ask yourself is, 'Am I telling the truth?'

In this crazy mirror of terror and art a pseudo-quotation made up of obscure Shakespeareanisms (Chapter Three) somehow produces, despite its lack of literal meaning, the blurred diminutive image of the acrobatic performance that so gloriously supplies the bravura ending for the next chapter.

That's the magic of books. They're never quite the same for any two people. When you read one, you automatically make it your own.

I very much hope that when my wife reads my writings so she reads it as if she is a character and not the real one. Sometimes she takes it too personally.

I don't want to sound like I'm trying to be too deep about it, but when we play shows, music takes everybody on their own journey - because one song might mean something to me, that means something completely different to someone else.