William H. Hunt Quotes

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.

Till now poets were privileged to insert a certain proportion of nonsense - very far in excess of one-half of one per cent - into their otherwise sober documents.

When you draw or paint a tree, you do not imitate the tree; you do not copy it exactly as it is, which would be mere photography. To be free to paint a tree or a flower or a sunset, you have to feel what it conveys to you: the significance, the meaning of it.

If you look at ancient Chinese paintings, you see mountains, but they are not real mountains; it is something the artists imagined.

To write regular verses destroys an infinite number of fine possibilities, but at the same time it suggests a multitude of distant and totally unexpected thoughts.

In poetry, you must love the words, the ideas and the images and rhythms with all your capacity to love anything at all.

Some painters transform the sun into a yellow spot, others transform a yellow spot into the sun.

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.

Jigging veins of rhyming mother wits.

A poem need not have a meaning and like most things in nature often does not have.

Once they're on paper, they're gone. I like to do as much with the words, as far as image goes.

All we need to do, reader or writer, from first line to final page, is be as open as a book, and be alive to the life in language - on all its levels.

Poems - crystallizations of the universal play of analogy, transparent objects which, as they reproduce the mechanism and the rotary motion of analogy, are waterspouts of new analogies.

You take stuff from different places, and sometimes you stick a line in because it rhymes, not because it makes sense.

Despite the impression you may have from watching too much TV, movies are not about reproducing reality. They're about telling stories.

Painting (like poetry) chooses from universals what is most apposite. It brings together, in a single imaginary being, circumstances and characteristics which occur in nature in many different persons.

And at least in poetry you should feel free to lie. That is, not to lie, but to imagine what you want, to follow the direction of the poem.

We all know that Art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize the truth, at least the truth that is given to us to understand.

The function of the artist is to invent, not to chronicle.

That willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith.

Art is not boosterism, it's not propaganda, and it's not spin, but that's not something that art does, and nor has it historically ever done it.

Literature invents its own rules.

That's what I like most about writing fiction over journalism: the easy metaphors!

Art is not journalism. In art, you don't make it to convey a message.

Whereas if you were writing an op-ed piece or an essay, somebody would be asking, "What's your point?" With poetry you can stay in a moment for as long as you want. Poetry is about metaphor, about a thing standing in for something else. It's the thing that opens out to something else. What that something else is changes for readers. So what's on the page - it falls away.