Alice Oswald Quotes

There is a certain aesthetic pleasure in trying to imagine the unimaginable and failing, if you are a reader.

Perhaps it is of more value to infuriate philosophers than to go along with them.

I won't call my work entertainment. It's exploring. It's asking questions of people, constantly. 'How much do you feel? How much do you know? Are you aware of this? Can you cope with this?' A good movie will ask you questions you don't already know the answers to. Why would I want to make a film about something I already understand?

You have to be willing to ask questions that almost no one else would ask.

I don't like films giving me answers. I like films that are provoking me, that are making me feel not only being in an easy place.

It is not the writer's task to answer questions but to question answers. To be impertinent, insolent, and, if necessary, subversive.

By intellectual liberty I mean the right to think and the right to think wrong.

I don't think we ought to base our policy on what the conventional wisdom is.... The conventional wisdom usually is wrong.

I have become more radical because I have seen more of the world.

You want a poem to unsettle something. There's a deep and interesting kind of troubling that poems do, which is to say, 'This is what you think you're certain of, and I'm going to show you how that's not enough. There's something more that might be even more rewarding if you're willing to let go of what you already know.'

Never judge something by whether it is popular or not. You don't have to follow trends. No one thought William Wilberforce was right at first.

I like to say it's an attitude of not just thinking outside the box, but not even seeing the box.

Anyone who regards poetry as an entertainment, as a 'read,' commits an anthropological crime, in the first place against himself.

I reject most conventional wisdom.

I've been listening to 'Chapo Trap House' - they're quite radical. Every time I listen to it, my brain feels opened up.

I believe that people should be able to question things.

If you look at most mainstream filmmaking, to be honest, some of these films aren't even asking questions anymore at all.

My job is not to give you all the answers. My job is to ask the questions.

Poetry and art are key influences in changing how we look at taboos.

I don't want to be married to any ideology, because life is a lot more fluid than that, and I think that we're trained and conditioned in this country to think in teams.

I like when my mind is being stimulated and challenged, and I'm forced to be creative.

I believe in being completely open to the most unlikely explanation.

Whoever has once been truly unsettled by a work of the imagination will never give loyalty to a single idea, belief system, religious faith or party.

I haven't got a problem with sheeple calling me crazy. What's sane? What is crazy?

I like movies as a viewer that challenge me to actually think rather than spoon feed everything to me.