Charles Churchill Quotes

I like the way words go together and I like the gamesmanship of writing poetry. It is such a challenge.

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

Poetry seems to be the only weapon able to beat language, using language's own means.

Poetry is a beautiful way of spoiling prose, and the laborious art of exchanging plain sense for harmony.

I've always loved rhyming. I love language.

I've always been a fan of poetry. I grew up with Lawrence Ferlinghetti and the Beat poets. I really followed that stuff for a while. I just love the way people threw words around like they were painting.

Every device there is in language is there to be used, if you will. Poets have got to enjoy themselves sometimes, and the twistings and convolutions of words, the inventions and contrivances, are all part of the joy that is part of the painful, voluntary work.

I remember reading Dr. Seuss books, and he's rhyming so many words together and I just loved the way it sounded. It became a challenge for me, to put words together that nobody would ever think about putting together.

Rap and spoken word have reawakened the country to poetry in itself. Texting and Twitter encourage creative uses of casual language, in ways I have celebrated widely. But we've fallen behind on savoring the formal layer of our language.

Poets deal in writing about feelings and trying to find the language and images for intense feelings.

Writing is immensely difficult. The short forms especially.

Jigging veins of rhyming mother wits.

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

I am not at all clear what free verse is anymore. That's one of the things you learn not to know.

Prose on certain occasions can bear a great deal of poetry; on the other hand, poetry sinks and swoons under a moderate weight of prose.

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

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.

I've been interested in writing and storytelling since I learned to read, but it wasn't until I read Dylan Thomas, when I was 14, that I became interested in language itself, and saw it as more than a transparent medium for a story.

A poet is a professional maker of verbal objects.

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 love playing with words and texture.

I like poems that are complex.

It should here be added that poetry habitually takes the form of verse.

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.