Craig Brown Quotes

I write all the time - I write poetry, I love to write.

Novels are such mysterious and amorphous and tender things.

If I were to have a dream job, it would probably be a poet. Then again, I don't think I'm a very good poet!

I did go there later, but I hadn't been there before I wrote the book. Sometimes I feel like the imagined can feel more real than the real?

Poets are the sense, philosophers the intelligence of humanity.

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

To be able to write a play a man must be sensitive, imaginative, naive, gullible, passionate; he must be something of an imbecile, something of a poet, something of a liar, something of a damn fool.

Genius is the ability to renew one's emotions in daily experience.

The funny thing about writing is I think a lot of people assume that you're sitting in a garret with a quill pen for hour after hour.

All poets are idlers, even if all idlers are not poets.

Without poets, without artists, men would soon weary of nature's monotony.

People assume that science is a very cold sort of profession, whereas writing novels is a warm and fuzzy intuitive thing. But in fact, they are not at all different.

The romanticised life, where all the great poetry and music and art of the world comes from, is great but it requires a lot of self-indulgence.

Yes, I do often write poems from the mind, but I hope I don't ignore feelings and emotions.

Poets are born, not paid.

The writer, the poet, the novelist, are all creators. This does not mean that they invent language; it means that they use language to create beauty, ideas, images. This is why we cannot do without them.

The poet doesn't invent. He listens.

A very receptive state of mind... not unlike a sheet of film itself - seemingly inert, yet so sensitive that a fraction of a second's exposure conceives a life in it.

Could I have chosen my own genius, I should have made myself a great poet.

I hate all poets and painters.

Like all novelists, I'm interested in the filters between reality and the imagination.

I think anybody alert to the inspiration to write has to be kind of sensitized to the unexpected.

It is popular to believe that in order to see clearly one must believe nothing. This may work well enough if you are observing cells under a microscope. It will not work if you are writing fiction. For the fiction writer, to believe nothing is to see nothing.

Fiction—and poetry and drama— cleanse the doors of perception.

I would like to break out of this "dark, brooding" image, cause I'm actually not like that at all. In Ireland, brooding is a term we use for hens. A brooding hen is supposed to lay eggs. Everytime somebody says "He's dark and brooding" I think: "He's about to lay an egg".