Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes

Once I planned to write a book of poems entirely about the things in my pocket. But I found it would be too long; and the age of the great epics is past.

When I'm old I shall give up writing the big stuff and shall wander round the park thinking of songs.

No verse can give pleasure for long, nor last, that is written by drinkers of water.

Poetry is the art which is technically within the grasp of everyone: a piece of paper and a pencil and one is ready.

You don't have to go fight bulls in Spain like Hemingway to write something great, or go off to war. It's right under your nose.

I used to spend a lot of time dreaming and writing poetry.

I'm incredibly restless. I read a lot of poetry. I also find myself reading the first 20 pages of everything, looking for something. And you know what? I'm usually looking for the book I'm writing. And it's not out there!

I believe there's a common ground in what all gifted writers write. It has to do with their wish to turn darkness into light.

I remember I was very taken with a book called DreamTigers by [Jorge Luis] Borges. He was at the University of Texas, Austin, and they collected some of his writings and put them in a little collection. It's called DreamTigers in English, but it doesn't exist in Spanish. It's a little sampler. But that collection in English is what struck me, because in there he has his poems, and I was a poet as well as a fiction writer.

Anyone who says, “Here’s my address, write me a poem,” deserves something in reply. So I’ll tell you a secret instead: poems hide. In the bottoms of our shoes, they are sleeping. They are the shadows drifting across our ceilings the moment before we wake up. What we have to do is live in a way that lets us find them.

And so I write the way I myself would like the book to be – if I were a child. I write for the child within me.

The ability to name poetry's gestures and rhetorics isn't required to write or read them, any more than a painter needs to know the physics of color to bring forward a landscape. The eye and hand and ear know what they need to know. Some of us want to know more, because knowing pleases.

I sip the Dom P watching Gandhi til I'm charged - writing in my book of rhymes, all the words past the margin

I feel that there are two kinds of writers. I feel that there are writers who are storytellers and then there are those just working out their obsessions. I think I'm a combination. I think, at least for these books, I'm going with fear. I've always been interested in fear. Fear is something I've dealt with in life, and I think it's the main motivating factor of everything, almost. From sex to politics.

If there is poetry in my book about the sea, it is not because I deliberately put it there, but because no one could write truthfully about the sea and leave out the poetry.

Song is not Truth, not Wisdom, but the rose Upon Truths lips, the light in Wisdom's eyes.

One night, Don Henley called, and I told him, 'I'm washing dishes and bike shorts.' He said, 'It's in the domestic exercises of life that one will find the biggest inspiration.' And he was right.

What is poetry? Do not enquire. The secret dies by prying. How does the heart beat? I fainted when I saw it on the screen, opening and closing like a flower ... Poetry is like this, it is life moving, terrible, vivid. Look the other way when you write, or you might faint.

I write not for your farthing, but to try. How I your farthing writers, may outvie.

In a way, that's also a recognition that Dante needs Virgil and that the Inferno needs the Aeneid and that the epic needs a model and that for Dante to write this great poem he needs someone to come before him and he turns to Virgil's text, especially book six where Aeneas goes down into the underworld. And for me, that's a model of the poet's relationship to previous poetry, to another poetry as calling out for guidance.

I write because to write a new sentence, let alone a new poem, is to cross the threshold into both a larger existence and a profound mystery. A thought was not there, then it is. An image, a story, an idea about what it is to be human, did not exist, then it does. With every new poem, an emotion new to the heart, to the world, speaks itself into being.

Without explaining why, and, most of all, without naming other authors or books, I can only say my novels are influenced by love and death.

The only environment the artist needs is whatever peace, whatever solitude, and whatever pleasure he can get at not too high a cost.

Be that blind bard who on the Chian strand, By those deep sounds possessed with inward light, Beheld the Iliad and the Odyssey Rise to the swelling of the voiceful sea.