James Thurber Quotes

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

I despair of ever writing excellent poetry.

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

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

No good poem, however confessional it may be, is just a self-expression. Who on earth would claim that the pearl expresses the oyster?

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.

An age which is incapable of poetry is incapable of any kind of literature except the cleverness of a decadence.

The ability to have somebody read something and see it, or for somebody to paint an entire landscape of visual imagery with just sheets of words - that's magical. That's what I've been trying to strive for - to draw a clear picture, to open up a new dimension.

Fiction is the truth inside the lie.

Metaphors are an interesting example of creating magic in prose.

Poetry: the best words in the best order.

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

Fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so slightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. Often the attachment is scarcely perceptible.

I've always wanted to write poems and nothing else.

I've always tried to be a poet more than anything else. I mean, professional musicians die.

The poet is someone, I think, who's interested in registering experience immediately or giving you the sense of immediacy and directness.

Actually, I'm working on a book of poetry.

One of the first things that helped me to understand certain things about writing was seeing 'The Iceman Cometh' in the Village when I was a kid, before I ever became a newspaperman, and realizing that the world I knew could also be the subject of some amazing stuff.

I read poetry every day. I look at it as an exercise, a kind of T'ai Chi for writers. It teaches economy of form.

Sunday is a likely day to write a poem. Because poetry is a piece of language flying around: you'll find notebooks, something on your phone. It's about finding them and getting them off that crumpled piece of paper and onto my computer.

Poetry and novels are lists of our devotions. We love the feel of making the marks as the feelings are rising and falling.

Like all novelists, I'm interested in the filters between reality and the imagination.

When it comes to the lyrics, I write about my own perception of things and use characters for that.

I'm a wizard at poetry.