Eugenio Montale Quotes

We have a lot of long narrative poems written in the 20th century, but they're not very well known, and they're not read by very many people.

I kind of dislike 'For Whom the Bell Tolls,' but most of Hemingway in general, mainly because his stylistic shenanigans ruined so many young writers of my generation who tried to imitate him. I think, for his time, he moved fiction to a different level stylistically, or at least added to the dialogue, but in our time, he's annoying.

If there's one thing I've written that could survive into posterity, I'd want that to be the poetry.

Being in the Sahitya Akademi, I did know quite a few poets - Jayanta Mahapatra, Sitakant Mahapatra, Sunil Gangopadhyay, to name a few. There were many poets.

Queen Latifah was writing poetry. Maybe Latifah's 'Ladies First' and Angelou's 'Phenomenal Woman' are the same thing, a generation apart.

I don't like a lot of the stuff that goes on in the art world, but it's hard to be old and like what goes on around you.

Literature is a state of culture, poetry is a state of grace, before and after culture.

The importance and influence of books on me has been cumulative: the result of hearing and reading lots of stories about interesting people and places.

I don't know if younger poets read a lot of, you know, the poets - the established poets. There was a lot of pretty boring stuff to sort of put up with and to add to, to make something vital from.

The most important American love poet in living memory, and certainly one of the most important American poets tout court, Robert Creeley was born in 1926 and raised in eastern Massachusetts.

In 1971, when I was 29, I wrote my first volume of poetry. I am a poet, and I have published four books of my poems.

For me, movies and television are interesting because they are the dominant storytelling form of our time. My first love will always be fiction, and especially novels, but I'm a writer... I write poetry and essays and criticism and I'd love to write a whole play, and sometimes I even write scripts.

Scholars have long dreamed of a universal library containing everything that has ever been written.

The music of language became extremely important to me, and obvious to me. By the time I was seven I was writing myself. I was a poet.

I'm a big believer in pairing classics with contemporary literature, so students have the opportunity to see that literature is not a cold, dead thing that happened once but instead a vibrant mode of storytelling that's been with us a long time - and will be with us, I hope, for a long time to come.

When you have an idea for a story, you want those characters to reach as many people as you can. I think you normally think of prose as a way of doing that. It fits our time, the culture.

I can imagine the writers of China, England and France, crippled and unsure of themselves when they feel that the ghosts of Confucius, Mencius, Chaucer and Shakespeare and Victor Hugo are looking over their shoulders.

I think plays, like books, are endemic. They grow out of the soil of the writer and the place he's writing about. I think, you just can't move them about, you know.

The chief glory of every people arises from its authors.

Shakespeare said pretty well everything and what he left out, James Joyce, with a judge from meself, put in.

There are so many good authors; there's no shortage of them.

I am constantly thinking ahead to what I want to write about in the future, and when I'm done with one project, I give myself a little time and then start the next one.

By the time I was seven, I did a sonnet at Shakespeare's Globe theatre for Shakespeare's birthday because my dad had been at the first season of the Globe and was friends with the artistic director. Somehow, that lead to me doing a sonnet!

There's not a good poet I know who has not at the beck and call of his memory a vast quantity of poetry that composes his mental library.

For a long time I thought I was a poet, but that's a high title to claim.