Franz Wright Quotes

As a songwriter, metaphor is instinctual.

I love to create interesting textures with language. You can do it as long as it seems like a discovery.

Once they're on paper, they're gone. I like to do as much with the words, as far as image goes.

I'm a failed poet. Reading poetry helps me to see the world differently, and I try to infuse my prose with figurative language, which goes against the trend in fiction.

I can make rhymes. My style of writing is kind of childlike anyway.

I like bringing my poet brain and sensibility to lyrics I write.

I always liked the magic of poetry but now I'm just starting to see behind the curtain of even the best poets, how they've used, tried and tested craft to create the illusion. Wonderful feeling of exhilaration to finally be there.

It's hard to write a song about reality because reality doesn't rhyme.

Writers can take offense when someone asks what's real or autobiographical in our work because, to us, that's not what counts. The bits taken from life are tiny scales on the dragon's tail - what about that whole beautiful writhing, fire-breathing dragon?

To write regular verses destroys an infinite number of fine possibilities, but at the same time it suggests a multitude of distant and totally unexpected thoughts.

I try not to be overly literal. When I'm writing songs, I write down a lot of words, and then I try to simplify it. I like to give people hints or words that make visual pictures for them.

The business of the poet is not to find new emotions, but to use the ordinary ones and, in working them up into poetry, to express feelings which are not in actual emotions at all.

I love the feeling of creating pictures in someone's mind just by spelling out the right lyrical combination.

But I can only write what the muse allows me to write. I cannot choose, I can only do what I am given, and I feel pleased when I feel close to concrete poetry - still.

Once in awhile you have a thought, and you rhyme it.

I have piles of poetry books in the bathroom, on the stairs, everywhere. The only way to write poetry is to read it.

You take stuff from different places, and sometimes you stick a line in because it rhymes, not because it makes sense.

I've always loved rhyming. I love language.

I like poems that are little games.

With me it's the whole thing, it's the conceit, the idea, what the poem is saying. And it goes on just as long as is necessary to say what needs to be said.

Writing poems is a chance to construct spaces that I want to imaginatively inhabit.

Poems seem to have a life of their own. They tell you when enough is enough.

The poetic act consists of suddenly seeing that an idea splits up into a number of equal motifs and of grouping them; they rhyme.

I like poems that are complex.

Clarity, clarity, surely clarity is the most beautiful thing in the world, A limited, limiting clarity I have not and never did have any motive of poetry But to achieve clarity.