Quotes by Paul Engle

About Paul Engle:

Paul Engle is perhaps best remembered as the long-time director of the Iowa Writers' Workshop and as founder of the International Writing Program (IWP), both at the University of Iowa.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

I grew up in the prolonged survival of the great age of the horse, with harness and saddle and sleigh bells and horse pictures, not as antiques but the facts of our lives.

Paul Engle

Has the painter not always gone to an art school, or at least to an established master, for instruction? And the composer, the sculptor, the architect? Then why not the writer? Good poets, like good hybrid corn, are both born and made.

Paul Engle

But maybe it's up in the hills under the leaves or in a ditch somewhere. Maybe it's never found. But what you find, whatever you find, is always only part of the missing, and writing is the way the poet finds out what it is he found.

Paul Engle

Verse is not written, it is bled; Out of the poet's abstract head. Words drip the poem on the page; Out of his grief, delight and rage.

Paul Engle

Without vision you don't see, and without practicality the bills don't get paid.

Paul Engle

I knew about holiness, never having missed a Sunday-school class since I started at four years. But if Jews were also religious, how could our neighbor with the grease-grimy shirt use the word 'damn' about them?

Paul Engle

For my Oxford degree, I had to translate French and German philosophy (as it turned out, Descartes and Kant) at sight without a dictionary. That meant Germany for my first summer vacation, to learn the thorny language on my own.

Paul Engle

Our small ears never had such a workout as on the Fourth of July, hearing not only our own bursting crackers but also those of our friends, and often the boom of homemade cannon shot off by daring boys of 16 years, ready to lose a hand if it blew up.

Paul Engle

Touch was important. The evening of the Third of July we would go around the neighborhood and look at the fireworks others had bought, taking them out of the brown paper sack and handling them cautiously as if they were precious stones. There was env...

Paul Engle

Corncobs are the greatest fire-making tinder.

Paul Engle

I can still remember the feel in my hand of that most wonderful American coin ever minted, a nickel with a buffalo on one side and the head of an Indian on the other. That nickel was a daily proof of our country's past. Bring it back!

Paul Engle

There must be an alternative between Hollywood and New York, between those two places psychically as well as geographically. The University of Iowa tries to offer such a community, congenial to the young writer, with his uneasiness about writing as a...

Paul Engle

Other families bought automobiles; we had a horse-headed hitching post in front of our house and drove horses.

Paul Engle

Contrary to slanderous Eastern opinion, much of Iowa is not flat, but rolling hills country with a lot of timber, a handsome and imaginative landscape, crowded with constant small changes of scene and full of little creeks winding with pools where sh...

Paul Engle

You come to know the aches and vanities and tastes and intrigues of an entire neighborhood at a drug store.

Paul Engle

I had been warned about Jews by my gentile friends - they did terrible things with knives to boys.

Paul Engle

When I took over the Writers' Workshop, it was one little class and there were eight students. All of them, brilliantly untalented... I had an absolute vision after the first workshop meeting.

Paul Engle

I have lectured at Town Hall N.Y., The Library of Congress, Harvard, Yale, Amherst, Wellesley, Columbia, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, Louisiana State University, Colorado, Stanford, and scores of other places.

Paul Engle

The way to praise a poet is to write a poem.

Paul Engle

To eat in the same room where food is cooked - that is the way to thank the Lord for His abundance.

Paul Engle

Author Bio

  • NamePaul Engle
  • DescriptionPoet, fiction writer, academic
  • BornOctober 12, 1908
  • DiedMarch 22, 1991
  • CountryUnited States Of America
  • ProfessionNovelist; Librettist
  • AwardsGuggenheim Fellowship