Christine and the Queens Quotes

A poem records emotions and moods that lie beyond normal language, that can only be patched together and hinted at metaphorically.

Poetry is an orphan of silence. The words never quite equal the experience behind them.

What you look for in a picture is a metaphor, something that means something more, that makes you think about things you've seen or thought about.

A lot of the lyrics I write involve images that just swing the song in a way that feels really good to me and there isn't a literal explanation. They're not riddles for the listener to solve.

Deep feeling doesn't make for good poetry. A way with language would be a bit of help.

The kinds of things that poetry can offer are timeless - mainly the kind of compression it offers of powerful language, powerful feelings and images, and, you know, the inner experience becoming outer.

My opinion is that a poet should express the emotion of all the ages and the thought of his own.

I'm of the Samuel Goldwyn school of writing: If you need to send a message, call Western Union. Any messages people take away from my books are the ones they see in them.

Not only is your story worth telling, but it can be told in words so painstakingly eloquent that it becomes a song.

Poetry involves the mysteries of the irrational perceived through rational words.

A poem can have an impact, but you can't expect an audience to understand all the nuances.

Poetry being the sign of that which all men desire, even though the desire be unconscious, intensity of life or completeness of experience, the universality of its appeal is a matter of course.

I like poems that are complex.

The real difference between literature and pulp is the kind of emotional responses they elicit. Dan Brown can't pierce your heart. Patricia Cornwell can't make you read a sentence twice and then look sightlessly out of the window.

In those days, it didn't take much imagination to come up with something that required great lyric development skills. You just thought of an experience that you might have gone through, and write it down.

We writers, as we work our way deeper into our craft, learn to drop more and more personal clues. Like burglars who secretly wish to be caught, we leave our fingerprints on broken locks, our voiceprints in bugged rooms, our footprints in the wet concrete.

At college, I wanted to be a poet. I liked the extremely concentrated language, the atmosphere of otherworldliness.

I'm very attracted to poetry for all the reasons someone likes poetry. The notion of compression seems to fit my personality.

One characteristic of modern poetry is that arrangement of parts which strikes many people as being violent or obscure.

The poet is someone, I think, who's interested in registering experience immediately or giving you the sense of immediacy and directness.

I think poetry, rather than suffering, is more and more sufficient to the needs of our society. It's one of the reasons so much of it is, for want of a better term, 'surreal.'

Piercing minds go mute around poetry. It is imagined to be overly technical, like advanced arithmetic; otherworldly, priestess-like; suffocatingly personal; excessively decorative; exhaustingly bourgeois or tiringly avant-garde.

I'm a big fan of lyrics - lyrics are the thing that move me in certain ways.

Film is not an amazing medium to relay interiority. I think literature is much better for that.

Poetry is a plan for a slit in the face of a bronze fountain goat and the path of fresh drinking water.