Virginia Woolf Quotes

The creations of a great writer are little more than the moods and passions of his own heart, given surnames and Christian names, and sent to walk the earth.

One day while studying a Yeats poem I decided to write poetry the rest of my life. I recognized that a single short poem has room for history, music, psychology, religious thought, mood, occult speculation, character, and events of one's own life. I still feel surprised that such various substances can find shelter and nourishment in a poem. A poem in fact may be a sort of nourishing liquid, such as one uses to keep an amoeba alive. If prepared right, a poem can keep an image or a thought or insights on history or the psyche alive for years, as well as our desires and airy impulses.

I have a graduate degree from Penn State. I studied at Penn State under a noted Hemingway scholar, Philip Young. I had an interest in thrillers, and it occurred to me that Hemingway wrote many action scenes: the war scenes in 'A Farewell to Arms' and 'For Whom the Bell Tolls' come to mind. But the scenes don't feel pulpy.

One of the things I love about writing is the way you can use what you know and what you've experienced, without actually writing about yourself. I've given many of my experiences and perceptions to many of the characters in the book, but none of them is me.

Good acting is all in the writing. If it isn't on the page, then it really won't make any difference. You cannot act on force of personality alone.

A lot of writers dwell on their relationships with their mothers, but only a few are worth reading.

When I was in college, I used to write little ditties and short stories and poetry for my friends. Writing a book is another thing. It is so much different from my traditional day of dirty fingernails and greasy hair and hot pans.

Somebody like Mailer brings to that role everything that he stands for. The types of characters that I gravitate towards, the types of icons, tend to have a heavy physicality in that way.

I think as an author every character ends up low-key being some kind of self-insert.

When you write a show, every character is you to some extent.

Russian literature got me interested in what literature means.

You're not just looking for laughs, but you're trying to do the characters first, and then the laughs come afterwards.

The thought of the novelist lies not in the remarks of his characters or even in their introspection but in the plight he has invented for his characters - in the juxtaposition of those characters and in the lifelike ramifications of the ensemble they make: their density, their substantiality, their lived existence actualized in all its nuanced particulars, is in fact his thought metabolized.

I am composed of contradictions, which is why poetry is a better form for me than philosophy

I don't like realism. We already know the real facts about li[fe], most of the basic facts. I'm not interested in repeating what we already know. We know about sex, about violence, about murder, about war. All these things, by the time we're 18, we're up to here. From there on we need interpreters. We need poets. We need philosophers. We need theologians, who take the same basic facts and work with them and help us make do with those facts. Facts alone are not enough. It's interpretation.

A good sentence in prose should be like a good line in poetry, unchangeable, as rhythmic, as sonorous.

There are in me, in literary terms, two distinct characters: one who is taken with roaring, with lyricism, with soaring aloft, with all the sonorities of phrase and summits of thought; and the other who digs and scratches for truth all he can, who is as interested in the little facts as the big ones, who would like to make you feel materially the things he reproduces.

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 concentrate on character, theme, language, structure, voice. It actually surprises me that no matter what I write, people declare it "intently political." I'm just writing about the world I know, as it is. Wounds and griefs included.

Strength of character is already written. What we bring, as an actor, is an almost 3D-ness to it.

I think poetry is the best thing I do. It's certainly the purest. I seem to switch gears without too much trouble. Non-fiction is in many ways the easiest to write.

As the new work fills my notebooks, I've come to realize that the characters in my stories were so real because I really did want to get close to people, I really did want to know them. It was just easier to do it on paper, one step removed.

The author can always delve into his own personality and find aspects of himself with which he can dress his characters.

I feel my characters are valid, my characters are people, my characters have hope. Hope is the thing that'll take us through.

When I feel something very intensely or deeply or personally, I can go to extremes of self-expression or self-analysis by writing a poem - more than I can just talking to somebody or writing prose.