Jiddu Krishnamurti Quotes

The only thing you can really say in a poem is what you really, really deeply believe.

No more pronouncements on lousy verse. No more hidden competition. No more struggling not to be a square.

The poet never asks for admiration; he wants to be believed.

A poet's first contract is with truth.

You know what ART stands for? Above Real Truth.

There’s only one subject for fiction or poetry or even a joke: how it is. In all the arts, the payoff is always the same: recognition. If it works, you say that’s real, that’s truth, that’s life, that’s the way things are. ‘There it is.’

Sometimes the truth don't rhyme

People were usually much better in their letters than in reality. They were much like poets in this way.

There is no objection to the proposal: in order to learn to be a poet, I shall try to write a sonnet. But the thing you must try to write, when you do so, is a real sonnet, and not a practice sonnet.

To be a poet is as serious, long-term and natural as the effort to be the best human you can be. To express something well is not a question of having a top-class education and understanding poetic forms: rather, it's a question of paying attention.

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.

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.

A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.

The first question at that time in poetry was simply the question of honesty, of sincerity.

I think that if writers don't speak about real life, it's because they don't know it.

Lyrics are kind of the whole thing; it's the message. Something might have a beautiful melody but if it's not the truth coming out of your mouth, it's not appealing.

You have to live what you write, or you have to know it. There are exceptions, like story songs, where you just have to have your facts straight. But I think you don't have to live a hard life to be a good or interesting songwriter.

I like to write poetry.

Lyrical poets have to be in touch with visceral experience. I've always tried to avoid virtual experiences. That's emerging in my fiction.

The great poems are not about experience, but are the experience itself, felt in the body.

A good poem looks life straight in the face, unflinching, sincere, equal to revelation through loss or gain.

A true poet does not bother to be poetical. Nor does a nursery gardener scent his roses.

I think poetry is as old as language, and both come out of the same thing - an effort to try to express something that is inexpressible.

The poet is someone, I think, who's interested in registering experience immediately or giving you the sense of immediacy and directness.

I'm a writer. My job is to speak what - that which I think is true. If that bridges the gap, that's good. If it doesn't, that's too bad.