JOHN BERRYMAN

The artist is extremely lucky who is presented with the worst possible ordeal which will not actually kill him. At that point, he's in business.

We must travel in the direction of our fear.

I didn't want to be like Yeats; I wanted to be Yeats.

Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so.

Bats have no bankers and they do not drink and cannot be arrested and pay no tax and, in general, bats have it made.

Them lady poets must not marry, pal.

Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so. After all, the sky flashes, the great sea yearns, we ourselves flash and yearn

Two daiquiris withdrew into a corner of a gorgeous room and one told the other a lie.

One must be ruthless with one's own writing or someone else will be.

I do strongly feel that among the greatest pieces of luck for high achievement is ordeal. Certain great artists can make out without it, Titian and others, but mostly you need ordeal. My idea is this: the artist is extremely lucky who is presented with the worst possible ordeal which will not actually kill him. At that point, he's in business: Beethoven's deafness, Goya's deafness, Milton's blindness, that kind of thing.

These Songs are not meant to be understood, you understand. They are only meant to terrify & comfort.

something has been said for sobriety but very little.

I think that what happens in my poetic work in the future will depend on my being knocked in the face, and thrown flat, and given cancer, and all kinds of other things short of senile dementia.

That is our ‘pointed task. Love & die.

I cry. Evil dissolves, & love, like foam; that love. Prattle of children powers me home, my heart claps like the swan's under a frenzy of who love me & who shine.

Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so. After all, the sky flashes, the great sea yearns, we ourselves flash and yearn, and moreover my mother told me as a boy (repeatedly) 'Ever to confess you're bored means you have no inner Resources.' I conclude now I have no inner resources, because I am heavy bored.

This world is gradually becoming a place Where I do not care to be any more.

We are using our own skins for wallpaper and we cannot win.

Literature bores me, especially great literature

You should always be trying to write a poem you are unable to write, a poem you lack the technique, the language, the courage to achieve. Otherwise you're merely imitating yourself, going nowhere, because that's always easiest.

I am so wise I had my mouth sewn shut.

So if I were talking to a young writer, I would recommend the cultivation of extreme indifference to both praise and blame because praise will lead you to vanity, and blame will lead you to self-pity, and both are bad for writers.

Wishin' was dyin' but I gotta make it all this way to that bed on these feet.

There is no such thing as Freedom (though it is the most important condition of human life, after Humility, -which does not exist either). There is only Slavery (walls around one) and absence-of-Slavery (ability to walk in any direction, or to remain still).