James Laughlin Quotes

All my editors since Malcolm Cowley have had instructions to leave my prose exactly as I wrote it. In the days of Malcolm Cowley, with 'On the Road' and 'The Dharma Bums', I had no power to stand by my style for better or for worse.

If you write a letter of resignation or something with an agenda, you're simply using a pen to record what you have thought out. In a poem, the pen is more like a flashlight, a Geiger counter, or one of those metal detectors that people walk around beaches with.

If you had a million Shakespeares, could they write like a monkey?

Literature is the orchestration of platitudes.

I can't imagine ever writing anything of any kind on a machine. I never tried to write either poetry or prose on a typewriter. I like to do it on useless paper, scrap paper, because it's of no importance.

I would rather write poems than prose, any day, any place. Yet each has its own force.

I write stories, I don't just write rhymes, I write books.

'Dept. of Speculation' contains numerous enviable lines.

I've always had an affinity for writers who have a poetry background, so I always liked Tennessee Williams.

For me, lyrics are the most important thing in a song. And if they don't have meaning, I would never sing them - unless and until someone who loves your work asks me to do so.

Ideally, I'd like to write poetry for public performances and prose for a different, more contemplative kind of consumption.

I have always believed that facilitating good, unusual content should be one of my prerogatives as someone who has spent half his life in cinema.

When I was young, I struggled with authorship: with everything the word meant and failed to mean. Irish poetry was heavy with custom. Sometimes at night, when I tried to write, a ghost hand seemed to hold mine. Where could my life, my language fit in?

I consider myself a lyrics guy.

I'm the complete technique of rhyme. I don't have no boundaries.

It was through poetry I learned just to appreciate my own voice and to not think of my voice in terms of what it needs to be able to do, but what it can do.

As cliche as that sounds, Maya Angelou is one of the best writers I've ever read. She's very wise and to the point.

I'm really into short-story collections and essays; they're my jam.

I don't have anything to prove as a writer anymore. I write about Panera Bread or Red Lobster or Satan or Richard Ramirez or whatever comes to mind. I just write.

I write, but I don't write poetry. I don't rhyme or anything like that.

When I was about twenty-one, I published a few poems. Maybe I wrote a couple of stories before, but I really began to write stories in my mid-thirties. My kids were still little, and they were in school and day care, and I had begun to think a lot about wanting to tell some stories and not being able to do it in poetry.

Each of us has his own alphabet with which to create poetry.

My own verse is usually free verse. The freer the better.

Literature is composed of quarter truths, and the quarters are often spent on penny candy.

Poetry is the renewal of words, setting them free, and that's what a poet is doing: loosening the words.