Ana Castillo Quotes

I think fiction goes to poetry for the intensity of its use of language.

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.

I don't think there's any essential difference, at least for me, between writing poetry and writing prose.

Working with language requires beauty for me.

Writing poetry helps me to write my fiction; each thing helps the other.

I always think its easier for me to write without thinking about the strict meter that's required for songs and song structures and things like that. It's much easier to just write on the page.

Poetry is probably the one field of writing in which it is a mistake to try to psych out editors. In fact, specific marketing advice can sometimes harm the novice poet by enticing him to pursue fashions. The poet's best hope is to sound like nobody else, The finest, most enduring poetry constructs a marketplace of its own.

I'm more interested in writing than in performing.

I would not be able to pen an academic and dry diatribe. I have too much talent for that.

You become a great writer by writing.

I write. This is what I do. My job is to sit down with my vocabulary, select words, and decide what order they should be placed in an attempt to keep someone's attention and perhaps provide them with a laugh or two along the way.

A grain of poetry suffices to season a century.

Well, I like to write poetry. I'm a published poet.

To sing a song is quite different than to write a poem. I'm not and never will be a novelist, but to write a novel is not the same thing as writing a play. There is a difference in form, but essentially what you're after is the same thing.

Poetry and prose are of equal importance to me as a reader, and there doesn't seem to be much difference in my own writing.

When I want to read a novel, I write one.

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

At the age of seventeen, I left school. I went to university, and I wrote my first attempts at poetry in a room in a flat at the edge of the city.

I'm a fan of creative writing and telling stories.

When you compose, it's like writing. You're like a writer. You just think all the time.

When it comes to poetry, I think partly the numbers of people attempting to write poems is probably a result or the reaction to technology.

If the poet wants to be a poet, the poet must force the poet to revise. If the poet doesn't wish to revise, let the poet abandon poetry and take up stamp-collecting or real estate.

I think there are a lot of similarities between writing and music. Music is much more direct and much more emotional and that's the level I want to be at when I'm writing. Writing is much more intellectual and indirect and abstract, in a way.

Fiction—and poetry and drama— cleanse the doors of perception.

First of all I think that poetry is very noble and I always have with me the sense of the nobility of poetry.