When I did a study of all the coming-of-age movies that meant a lot to me, whether it was 'The Graduate' or 'Rebel Without a Cause' or 'Dead Poet's Society,' they all had that timeless feel. None of them were completely married to the details of thei...
There were the usual exhortations to purity – think of the novel not as your opportunity to get rich or famous but to wrestle, in your own way, with the titans of the form – exhortations poets don’t have to make, given the economic marginality ...
You have seven writers in your basement?” Donald nods, signing, “They like it here. There’s a poet, a couple of novelists, an opera librettist, an essay writer . . . . They don’t usually make much trouble.
An as-yet-unpublished poet in Boulder, Colorado, once said to me that anything worth doing was worth doing badly. I may seem, in the foregoing sketchy pages, to have followed her advice rather too well.
It starts off like climbing a tree or solving a puzzle - poetry, if nothing else, is just fun to write. But deeper into each and every piece, you no longer hesitate to call it work. It's passion. A poet's sense of lyrical accomplishment is then his f...
As a poet there is something about joy I find hard to express, whereas every other emotion is rather simple. For instance, you never feel so bad that you can't describe how bad you feel, but joy on the other hand is far too divine for human language.
A perfect poem owes its perfection to sounding the voice of the heart and the melodies of the conscience, as well as its ability to reflect the considerations, beliefs, opinions, and horizons of thought of the poet, but not due to its formal or menta...
When the poet Paul Valery once asked Albert Einstein if he kept a notebook to record his ideas, Einstein looked at him with mild but genuine surprise. "Oh, that's not necessary," he replied . "It's so seldom I have one.
The most sublime labour of poetry is to give sense and passion to insensate things; and it is characteristic of children to take inanimate things in their hands and talk to them in play as if they were living persons... This philological-philosophica...
The American bards shall be marked for generosity and affection and for encouraging competitors… . The great poets are also to be known by the absence in them of tricks and by the justification of perfect personal candor… . How beautiful is cando...
Someday there will be girls and women whose name will no longer mean the mere opposite of the male, but something in itself, something that makes one think not of any complement and limit, but only life and reality: the female human being.
there is only solitude, and it is vast, heavy, difficult to bear, and almost everyone has hours when he would gladly exchange it for any kind of sociability, however trivial or cheap, for the tiniest outward agreement with the first person who comes ...
Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.
Great sadnesses … they are the moments when something new has entered into us, something unknown; our feelings grow mute in shy perplexity, everything in us withdraws, a stillness comes, and the new, which no one knows, stands in the midst of it an...
Authors can write stories without people assuming that they are autobiographies, but songwriters and poets are often considered to be the characters in their works. I like Michelangelo's vision, 'I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set h...
you will never catch up. Walk around feeling like a leaf know you could tumble at any second. Then decide what to do with your time. --The Art of Disappearing
So I don’t think I’ll make Poet Laureate, but I swear I’m not twisted and bitter, If finely-wrought talents don’t weigh in the balance, I can always write haiku on Twitter.
Two silent time zones had now merged to form the standard time of one man's fate; and it is not impossible that the poet in New Wye and the thug in New York awoke that morning at the same crushed beat of their Timekeeper's stopwatch.
Blessed are the weird people: poets, misfits, writers mystics, painters, troubadours for they teach us to see the world through different eyes.
A Spanish poet, Antonio Machado, once said: ‘Dijiste media verdad. Dirán que mientes dos veces si dices la otra mitad.’” “Translated means…” “You told a half-truth. They’ll say you lie twice when you tell the other half.
I am no poet. I do not love words for the sake of words. I love words for what they can accomplish. Similarly, I am no arithmetician. Numbers that speak only of numbers are of little interest to me.
