Anne Waldman Quotes

The rise of the dramas in the thirteenth century, and the rise of the great novels in a later period, together with their frank glorification of love and the joys of life, may be called the Third Renaissance.

Hemingway changed prose; so did Salinger and Nabokov.

If critics of 'readable fiction' want literature to change the ways people dream, they need first to come down from the mountain and speak to the people.

I'm a huge fan of David Hockney. I love the way he keeps reinventing himself.

On July 26, 1916, I announced to all my friends in America that from now on I resolved to write no more poems in the classical language, and to begin my experiments in writing poetry in the so-called vulgar tongue of the people.

The Romantics were whipping boys of the New Criticism, but they appealed to me anyway. I was recalcitrant. It was clear to me that they had thought innovatively.

Their free verse was no form at all, yet it made history.

I think there was a revolution in poetry, associated chiefly with Eliot and Pound; but maybe it is of the nature of revolutions or of the nature of history that their innovations should later come to look trivial or indistinguishable from technical tricks.

Reform and exchange in English poetry are as slow as in the British constitution itself.

I think that as long as you have other poets before you and that you can learn from them, then it's always open ended for you.

As an artist, you take things from your environment, and there's going to be a style coming out of your environment.

I had gone to Paris to immerse myself in painting and I came back wholly involved in words and rhythms.

It is quite possible for a work of literature to operate as a war machine upon its epoch.

One night a friend lent me a book of short stories by Franz Kafka. I went back to the pension where I was staying and began to read The Metamorphosis. The first line almost knocked me off the bed. I was so surprised. The first line reads, “As Gregor Samsa awoke that morning from uneasy dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect. . . .” When I read the line I thought to myself that I didn’t know anyone was allowed to write things like that. If I had known, I would have started writing a long time ago. So I immediately started writing short stories.

I feel that every professional is the art school for the next guy. I feel that maybe a lot of the dynamism in my own work, having been felt by the rest of the artists, they'll react to it and put elements of that in their own work, feeling that it'll help it.

I always prefer to work in the studio. It isolates people from their environment

If I were of the trade, I should naturalize art as much as they "artialize" nature.

Keetje Kuipers' poems are daring, formally beautiful and driven by rich imagery and startling ideas.

It is possible to deal with the entire environment as a work of art.

From the period when I wrote La Nausea I wanted to create a morality. My evolution consists in my no longer dreaming of doing so.

Shakespeare is the Joss Whedon of his generation.

The construct of William Gibson the Writer is coming down, and become more open. It's more of a Glasnost - Transparency! Transparency is what it is.

You absorb so much from whatever your environment is, as an artist, and you learn to take from it what can help you create.

Perhaps no poet is a conscious plagiarist, but there seems to be warrant for suspecting that there is no poet who is not at one time or another an unconscious one.

There has never been a great poet who wasn't also a great reader of poetry.