Evelyn Waugh Quotes

Words are like Leaves; and where they most abound, Much Fruit of Sense beneath is rarely found.

We are symbols, and inhabit symbols.

I keep trying to define 'poetry,' but it's so difficult.

What I responded to, on the page, was the way a poem could liberate, by means of a word's setting, through subtleties of timing, of pacing, that word's full and surprising range of meaning. It seemed to me that simple language best suited this enterprise.

Many of today's verses are prose and bad prose.

Prose is all about embellishing and describing.

The words of the world want to make sentences.

So I suppose poetry, language, the shaping of it, was and remains for me an effort to make sense out of essentially senseless situations.

During the '70s I was interested in words and meaning as a way of making art.

Words have a life of their own. There is no telling what they will do. Within a matter of days, they can even turn turtle and mean the opposite.

I read mostly poetry.

All we need to do, reader or writer, from first line to final page, is be as open as a book, and be alive to the life in language - on all its levels.

At a certain point, what people mean when they use a word becomes its meaning.

I'm not really quiet or shy. Ask any of my friends! But I always ground my poetry in life itself. Poetry is an art of language, though, so I am always aware of every word's meaning, or multiple meanings.

Curiously enough, it seems to be only in describing a mode of language which does not mean what it says that one can actually say what one means.

I've always loved rhyming. I love language.

It's not easy to define poetry.

Metaphor matters because it creates expectations.

It's a strange world of language in which skating on thin ice can get you into hot water.

I think of myself as a writer as much as I think of myself as a linguist and an academic. I really enjoy writing - playing with language and getting just the right metaphor.

I enjoy the inventive ways in which language is manipulated to make meaning.

I know a lot about words. I get paid to write stories, so I get to talk with people about the meaning behind words all day.

I think that's what poets try to do: They try to sidestep neurology and go straight to meaning.

One must be drenched in words, literally soaked in them, to have the right ones form themselves into the proper pattern at the right moment.

The metaphors exist for the stories.