Michael Finkel Quotes

Since my woman's world is perceived greatly through the emotions and the senses, I treat it that way in my writing - and am often overweighted with heavy descriptive passages and a kaleidoscope of similes.

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

My writing style is very sensual, as in sensory detail.

The writer of prose can only step aside when the poet passes.

I started writing poetry in high school because I wanted desperately to write, but somehow, writing stories didn't appeal to me, and I loved the flow and the feel and sense of poetry, especially that of what one might call formal verse.

I'm a very conceptual writer.

I would never write a sentence that didn't have a nice rhythm, or at least I wouldn't leave it to be published like that. It seems to me that prose mustn't be prosaic.

I hope readers will think that 'The Thing About Life' is beautifully patterned, a tapestry.

I think fiction goes to poetry for the intensity of its use of language.

The best public poems aren't necessarily those that go at the subject like a bull at a gate.

I would not be able to pen an academic and dry diatribe. I have too much talent for that.

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

In my own writing, I think of myself as a realist who exaggerates a little.

Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words.

Every writer has his writing technique - what he can and can't do to describe something like war or history. I'm not good at writing about those things, but I try because I feel it is necessary to write that kind of thing.

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

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.

I don't try to call myself a poet. But I know that my stuff is pretty literal, in that the themes are pretty simple and on the surface.

A poem need not have a meaning and like most things in nature often does not have.

Of course the other and more serious way in which it all happens is that one finds in poems and language some quality one appropriates for oneself and wishes to reproduce.

I must say, when I reread myself, it's the poetry I tend to look at. It's the most exciting to write, and it's over the quickest.

You don't make a poem with ideas, but with words.

Not only is your story worth telling, but it can be told in words so painstakingly eloquent that it becomes a song.

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.