Padgett Powell Quotes

The object of poetic activity is essentially language: whatever his beliefs and convictions, the poet is more concerned with words than with what these words designate.

I consider what I write to be literature. I choose the words carefully.

The idea of writing, to me, was, from the beginning, was writing something which was a little different from the ordinary exchange of speech. It was something that had a certain formality, something in which the words were of interest in themselves.

The thing about good writing is it has a music to it.

When I really want to be soothed and reminded of why people bother to fiddle with sentences, I often read poetry.

When you are a sentence-based writer, they have to be good. They have to be really on the spot. Because when you don't have a plot, really, what shall you rely on? Just language. And sometimes I am so afraid of writing the wrong thing, I just sit and wait for the right thing to come.

I use not casual phrases but imagistic phrases that create a rhythm of natural presence.

I believe so deeply in the primacy of language, in lifting your prose to the highest level you're capable of and making your words symphonic.

In writing, I try to find the right balance between momentum and infinity, truth and beauty.

Jigging veins of rhyming mother wits.

Lapped in poetry, wrapped in the picturesque, armed with logical sentences and inalienable words.

Poets write the words you have heard before but in a new sequence.

In writing, I want to be remembered for telling good stories in beautiful and powerful language, using the poetry of words to reflect the thematic concerns of compelling stories.

If we ask a vague question, such as, 'What is poetry?' we expect a vague answer, such as, 'Poetry is the music of words,' or 'Poetry is the linguistic correction of disorder.'

My aim is to put down on paper what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way.

Everyone is not able, or inclined, to write poetry in the narrower sense any more than everyone is qualified to take part in a walking race. But just as all of us can and do walk, so all of us can and do use language poetically.

The short story seems like the best of all possible worlds. I do feel it is closer to writing poetry than to writing a novel, with its requirements of concentration and economy.

I am not a grammarian. Maybe my style is eccentric.

Writing is not like acting, where you can pull these little stunts that create a particular effect. Words are all it is about, and the way you use words has to be individual and particular to you.

I did try to write stories in college because I was interested in writing, and I was interested in the sound of language, but I was just no good at narrative and at fiction.

I enjoy the challenge of trying to say things beautifully. The message is secondary in that sense. Obviously, I have something that I want to say that's very, very important to me - but the process of actually crafting it is essential.

The future author is one who discovers that language, the exploration and manipulation of the resources of language, will serve him in winning through to his way.

What moves me most is style: the quality of the writing rather than the story being told.

It used to be that phrases and lines would come into my head, often many of them in a period of five days or a week, and maybe I didn't know what I was talking about, but the words had a kind of heaviness or deliciousness to them.

In a poem the words should be as pleasing to the ear as the meaning is to the mind.