F. Sionil Jose Quotes

I think the writing of literature should give pleasure. What else should it be about? It is not nuclear physics. It actually has to give pleasure or it is worth nothing.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti had a tremendous education as an artist and also an enormous knowledge of literarture.

Literature is a state of culture, poetry is a state of grace, before and after culture.

Look at the history of literature, and you find the history of beauty on the one hand and the IOUs on the other.

Literature is the orchestration of platitudes.

I've always been interested in visual art and used to be much more into theater when I was younger, or more knowledgeable about what's going on. And literature has played a big part in my life.

Film and TV are the most popular mediums in America. Literature and poetry are possibly the most under-recognized art forms.

Poetry, whose material is language, is perhaps the most human and least worldly of the arts, the one in which the end product remains closest to the thought that inspired it.

Gregory Corso used to get really pissed when people called Bob Dylan a 'poet.' After writing poetry for a few years, I can understand that.

I'm sure I've been influenced by every fine writer I've ever read, from Dickens and Austen to Auden and Jane Hirshfield. And also, the short stories of Updike, Cheever, Munro, Alice Adams, and Doris Lessing. And the plays of Oscar Wilde. And paintings by Alice Neel and Matisse.

We all write poems; it is simply that poets are the ones who write in words.

I definitely used to write a lot at school. Comic poetry and drawings about people.

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

Literature, of course, is not a contest.

Form is endlessly interesting to me, and I love poetry as a formal enterprise.

Novelists and poets have existed side by side forever.

I guess I'm drawn to artists and literary people and want to learn about them.

Culture is the arts elevated to a set of beliefs.

My first love is literature.

A writer is an artist. They're creating things out of thin air.

In the field of aesthetic theory, humans are pattern-seeking creatures. That can be seen in terms of musical structures, patternmaking, even in terms of storytelling and literature.

The art of writing fiction is to sail as dangerously close to the truth as possible without sinking the ship

A poet's work consists less in seeking words for his ideas than in seeking ideas for his words and predominant rhythms.

Poetry is a subject as precise as geometry.

A poem is no place for an idea.