The more transparent the writing, the more visible the poetry.
The wonderful thing about a book is that you have a canvas that is 300 pages wide, and it's all free space. You can make a piece of art as big as you want and whatever shape you want.
Now I began to understand art as a kind of black box the reader enters. He enters in one state of mind and exits in another. The writer gets no points just because what's inside the box bears some linear resemblance to "real life" -- he can put whatever he wants in there. What's important is that something undeniable and nontrivial happens to the reader between entry and exit.
Who casts to write a living line, must sweat.
For me, writing essays, prose and fiction is a great way to be self-indulgent.
Writing is an act of faith, not a trick of grammar.
A poet is a professional maker of verbal objects.
Literature... is the union of suffering with the instinct for form.
Stories that can be told through language and words don't need to be filmed.
It's my own personal unconscious that ultimately creates the novel's aesthetic facade.
One reason I've never been a fan of graphic novels is because a central aspect of literature for me has always been imagining what the things I'm reading about look like.
Poetry is the statement of a relation between a man and the world
Poetry is either language lit up by life or life lit up by language
When writing, I'm not thinking about war, even if I'm writing about it. I'm thinking about sentences, rhythm and story. So the focus, when I'm working, even if it's on a story that takes place at war, is not on bombs or bullets. It's on the story.
Fiction is the truth inside the lie.
I would rather write poems than prose, any day, any place. Yet each has its own force.
A poem begins in delight and ends in wisdom.
A writer is an artist. They're creating things out of thin air.
Poetry, which is written while no one is looking, is meant to be looked at for all time.
I wanted to become a writer and felt that poetry was perfected language, so having it in my subconscious mind would make the music of language always available to me.
I don't feel like a celebrity. Poetry justifies celebrity. It's good to have respect for a poet.
I've always wanted to write poems and nothing else.
POETRY, n. A form of expression peculiar to the Land beyond the Magazines.
I'm a happy camper when I'm doing both: writing and art every day, along with a dose of reading and adventures into what else is being done by other artists/writers and poets. Like breathing. I've written poems or fictions to go with a painting. The source for the inspiration of the art often eludes me.
A Poem does not grow by jerks. As trees in Spring produce a new ring of tissue, so does every poet put forth a fresh outlay of stuff at the same season.
