There are interesting forms of difficulty, and there are unprofitable forms of difficulty. I mean, I enjoy some difficult poetry, but some of it is impenetrable and I actually wouldn't want to penetrate it if I could, perhaps.
Modernism in other arts brought extreme difficulty. In poetry, the characteristic difficulty imported under the name of modernism was obscurity. But obscurity could just as easily be a quality of metrical as of free verse.
When you're writing fiction or poetry... it really comes down to this: indifference to everything except what you're doing... A young writer could do worse than follow the advice given in those lines.
The Vietnam War and the Iraq war, in different ways, both made me feel like I could not not address them. I'm very doubtful about the usefulness of poetry to do that.
I have no problem with it. I don't look on homosexuality as an aberration. It's just they way they're born, and how could any relationship between two people in a committed relationship be wrong, regardless of gender?
A lot of people are afraid to face themselves, especially when something goes wrong. But that's important, because if something happens within a relationship, it could be how you're allowing someone else to treat you.
I was in relationship with a guy who was much older than me - either he was past his prime and I was coming into mine. There was nothing I could do to keep his attention.
Over the years, I've been trying to build a relationship with an audience. I've tried to maintain as much of a low profile as I could so that those characters would emerge and their relationship with audiences would be protected.
Creatively, I thought we were still viable and could do more records. But our working relationship just wasn't happening at all, and our chemistry as people broke down because of that.
This is the point being missed by readers who lament Liquor's lack of hot sex scenes, probably because they aren't old enough to understand that a passionate relationship could be about anything other than sex.
I think the worst part about a breakup sometimes, if one could choose a worst part, would possibly be if you get out of a relationship, and you don't recognize yourself because you changed a lot about you.
You could argue that 'Sweeney Todd' was romantic, if you looked closely at it, but it didn't impart that to its audiences. But it's large, and it's melodramatic, and it's a style I like to work in periodically.
If you're a woman and a guy's ever said anything romantic to you, he just left off the second part that would have made you sick if you could have heard it.
The only thing I can ever do is make a film that I can respond to. I could not make a romantic comedy for college girls. I wouldn't know how that works.
Who could look on these monuments without reflecting on the vanity of mortals in thus offering up testimonials of their respect for persons of whose very names posterity is ignorant?
I have more respect for somebody who points at his ideal - in this case, the ideal of the pirate - and then becomes something that's more radical, more exciting, more subversive than a pirate could ever be.
The East Germans first used biomechanics. This meant that rather than guessing about technique and form, they could apply changes to athletic performance based on science.
Just after World War II, this country led the world in science by every way you could measure it, yet the number of scientists was a tiny proportion of what it is now.
I talked to ex-wives of musicians of the '70s for research. They're the funniest people in the world, yet there is this sad, beautiful thing in their eyes that says they've seen more than they could ever possibly tell you.
I get the feeling a lot of politicians are there to help themselves financially, first and foremost. I don't really need to do that, and I thought if I could do something for sport in Scotland, that would be really fulfilling.
I think the biggest things I am looking forward to is getting new faces into the sport. Getting kids who could be afraid of water to feel comfortable in the pool.
