C. K. Williams Quotes

I just love language. I mean, I love it. I love stage directions. Any opportunity to write. I hadn't written in so long, I get very crazy and miserable. I - it's like not seeing my kids: I can't do it for very long.

I write all the time - I write poetry, I love to write.

In poetry, you must love the words, the ideas and the images and rhythms with all your capacity to love anything at all.

Everyone thinks they're going to write one book of poems or one novel.

Well, I still write poetry, but I wouldn't call myself a poet.

I sometimes talk about the making of a poem within the poem.

I think there must be something wrong with me as a writer. Because all my friends who are writers find reasons to hate everything about their day. But I just love writing. I love starting the day with language and seeing if I can make something of it.

I write about what haunts me, and I write the books I myself am dying to read. I love it. I can't think of anything I'd rather do.

Sunday is a likely day to write a poem. Because poetry is a piece of language flying around: you'll find notebooks, something on your phone. It's about finding them and getting them off that crumpled piece of paper and onto my computer.

I've written poetry most of my life.

I started out as a poet. I've always been a poet since I was 7 or 8. And so I feel myself to be fundamentally a poet who got into writing novels.

I love writing books - I really do. If I could just quit everything and work on a book every day, I would love that most.

I write poetry anyway and have for years and years. For me, putting fiction and poetry together is like the best of both worlds.

I am still interested in the long or serial poem, but have written a few smaller things. I may start sending to journals again in a year or so... that's about it.

Students often have such a lofty idea of what a poem is, and I want them to realize that their own lives are where the poetry comes from. The most important things are to respect the language; to know the classical rules, even if only to break them; and to be prepared to edit, to revise, to shape.

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

If I were assigned poems I suppose I'd write more of them but it is entirely voluntary and for the most part ignored in the market sense of the word so the language to me is most intimate, most important, most sublime and most satisfying when it gets done.

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 can recite poetry, but I cannot write it.

Perhaps first and foremost is the challenge of taking what I find as a reader and making it into a poem that, primarily, has to be a plausible poem in English.

The idea that a poem was a made thing stayed with me, and I decided then that I wanted to be an artist, not just a diarist. So I put myself through a kind of apprenticeship in writing poetry, and I understood even then that my practice as a poet was deeply related to my reading.

I love to write. It's my first love.

One problem we face comes from the lack of any agreed sense of how we should be working to train ourselves to write poetry.

I'm conscious of a series of circles working its way through my life. And at this particular moment I have come round to the beginning of my writing cycle. It begins with poetry. There's hardly a day that goes past on which I don't write poetry.

If a poet is anybody, he is somebody to whom things made matter very little - somebody who is obsessed by Making.