Kevin Ayers Quotes

I lost many literary battles the day I read 'Their Eyes Were Watching God.' I had to concede that occasionally aphorisms have their power. I had to give up the idea that Keats had a monopoly on the lyrical.

I had written my master's thesis on Ezra Pound on 'The Cantos.' And don't ask me about it. I don't remember anything about it.

I cannot understate the ability to handle classical texts such as Shakespeare.

It hardly seems worthwhile to point out the shortsightedness of those practitioners who would have us believe that the form of the poem is merely its shape.

Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea.

With fiction, you can talk about plot, character and narrative, whereas a poem brings home the fact that everything that happens in a work of literature happens in terms of language. And this is daunting stuff to deal with.

With my fiction, I focused on chapters and overall conceptions, while in poetry, I crawled along in the trenches of each sentence, examining every word for a sign of a deeper significance.

Being a literature major, you know, I'm very familiar with the ways symbolism is used in our sort of mythic tales of society, so anyone who is consciously trying to pull that off I think is really interesting and clearly very smart.

But it's not just a game of finding literary references.

Most students of literature can pick apart a metaphor or spot an ethnic stereotype, but not many of them can say things like: 'The poem's sardonic tone is curiously at odds with its plodding syntax.'

I think of reading like a balanced diet; if your sentences are too baggy, too baroque, cut back on fatty Foster Wallace, say, and pick up Kafka as roughage.

Read not Milton, for he is dry; nor Shakespeare, for he wrote of common life.

With Shakespeare, there's no subtext; you're speaking exactly what you're thinking constantly.

I taught high school English for 24 years. I always teach my students to appreciate the beauty of language and to write poetically.

In high school I was very much involved in poetry. You cannot read a poem quickly. There's too much going on there. There are rhythms and alliterations. You have to read poetry slow, slow, slow to absorb it all.

I think the pattern of my essays is, A funny thing happened to me on my way through Finnegans Wake.

I'm an old English major from way back, so I do have fun tearing apart texts and trying to find the hidden secrets and the subtexts in there.

The reader's challenge is to replicate the experiment by reading the poem and to draw their own conclusions.

Literature could be said to be a sort of disciplined technique for arousing certain emotions.

I like to play with tropes.

I don't think it's always good to read lots of poetry.

A poem can have an impact, but you can't expect an audience to understand all the nuances.

Quotations in my work are like wayside robbers who leap out armed and relieve the stroller of his conviction.

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 liked teaching Henry James. When you look down at a Henry James novel from a helicopter height, you find an intricate spider web that all clings together.