Wislawa Szymborska Quotes

I do not write for the reader to come, but for him who is here, short of reading the text on my shoulder.

I enjoy the Web site a lot and I like being able to talk to my readers. I've always had a very close relationship with them.

My focus is on the reader and that the poet's job is not to inspire himself or herself. The poet's job is to inspire some future reader.

I'm very conscious that people dear to me are alive in my imagination - poets in particular.

I don't know whether a poem has be there to help to develop something. I think it's there for itself, for what the reader finds in it.

As a young man, Yeats spoke to me in a way I could understand. Shakespeare I couldn't understand, but Yeats I could. It was his subject matter and also I really admired the way he put his personal life on the line.

At the time I was growing up, literature was involved with the so-called confessional poets. And I was not interested in that. I did not think that specific and personal perspective functioned well for the reader at all.

Watching something is a personal experience, and I think watching something that is dealing with a heavy subject matter, it's a personal thing.

I often use nameless places in my work as a way of allowing the readers to create more of the novel and to make it potentially about their experiences, what they know, a city that they have perhaps seen on television.

I learn a lot about my poems when I read them by the way people respond to them.

When you're literally staring at the person right in front of you, you're connecting with them on a personal level. I even jump into the crowd sometimes and perform with them, sing into the mic with them and share the experience with them.

'La La Land' is about the city I live in. It's about the music that I grew up playing; it's about movies that I grew up watching. Even the big spectacle of the movie feels private to me in that way.

I work with a lot of young people who have poems that are changing their lives, that they're eager to talk about, but every now and then when I meet someone, maybe someone of my parents' generation, and I tell them that I write poetry, they'll begin to recite something that they memorized when they were in school that has never left them.

There are some things that I write that I know are personal in a way, or the gag is so obscure that it's just for me, and there's other things that could basically be for anybody or be anything, at least until the lyrics start to get written.

I was portraying the family through my eyes. Everything that's happened in the strip has happened to me.

I want to write a story for people where they finish it, and it sticks with them.

To me, soul music is anything that is made from the heart, and therefore moves the listener; it's not overly self-aware, and leaves room for the listener to make their own conclusions.

I wasn't happy with Tagore's own translations in English. Maybe he was, but I wasn't, so I took it upon myself to do it.

Even if somebody wanted to tell me what one of my songs meant to him or her, I can't do it - I would be probably put to tears every time.

I was well read and knew languages, but I didn't want to become Ezra Pound. I wanted to write poetry that people like my parents might respond to.

I really do pride myself on being able to help other people tell their stories and bring out the best in them. But I still, every song I'm writing, I still need to relate to it. I still need to find my true self in it, or else it'll feel dishonest. I mean, everything has a queer meaning as far as I'm concerned.

I'm far more interested in putting a little more meat into the lyrics than some people are.

I do understand my limitations as a fiction writer, which is why my novels are always going to be close to home.

That's part of what I remember about seeing the movies that influenced me: the experience of watching them with a crowd and how they react to something.

Why shouldn't poetry address what happened yesterday and be published in the newspaper?