John Denham Quotes

All this is rather pretentious and fey to even talk about, but Flannery O'Connor sat down to write stories. The rest of us, some of us, don't have that kind of wit and genius. We don't do that. We sit down and have some accidents.

Poetry is a beautiful way of spoiling prose, and the laborious art of exchanging plain sense for harmony.

The heart of the matter seems to me to be the direct interaction between one's making a poem in English and a poem in the language that one understands and values. I don't see how you can do it otherwise.

One can be a great poet and be politically stupid.

Maybe there are three or four really good poets in a generation.

In an ideal world, the perfect biographical subject would have been the star of his penmanship class at grade school - and would thereafter write an English that positively sings.

Perhaps first and foremost is the challenge of taking what I find as a reader and making it into a poem that, primarily, has to be a plausible poem in English.

Truman Capote was a magical, beautiful writer.

James Salter has talents on the page we novelists would sell souls to the devil for.

You marvel at the economy and this choice of words. How many ways can you describe the sky and the moon? After Sylvia Plath, what can you say?

I'm quite sure that most writers would sustain real poetry if they could, but it takes devotion and talent.

Novelist and poet David Huddle is a quiet but fabulous writer, and he does adolescent longing better than anyone I know.

My secret dream is to write an epic poem. That's probably the most pretentious thing I've said.

Many poets, as you know, are not good readers.

Essayists, like poets, are born and not made, and for one worth remembering, the world is confronted with a hundred not worth reading. Your true essayist is, in a literary sense, the friend of everybody.

Poets are born, not paid.

Poesy must not be drawn by the ears: it must be gently led, or rather, it must lead, which was partly the cause that made the ancient learned affirm it was a divine, and no human skill, since all other knowledges lie ready for any that have strength of wit; a poet no industry can make, if his own genius be not carried into it.

No poet ever interpreted nature as freely as a lawyer interprets truth.

The only nice poets I've ever met were bad poets, and a bad poet is not a poet at all - ergo, I've never met a nice poet.

There are some incredibly gifted writers in the world. You can count them on a hand. They're blessed, and they've worked at their craft, but there's very few.

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.

Nobody can write stories like Malayalam writers.

Anyone who holds a pen these days thinks he or she is a poet.

Celeste Ng is such a gifted writer.

I'm a lousy writer, and it shows when I try to write poetry.