Anne Carson Quotes

I'm a failed poet. Reading poetry helps me to see the world differently, and I try to infuse my prose with figurative language, which goes against the trend in fiction.

The talent of a true writer and poet is in the ear.

After I'd been in college for a couple years I'd read Shakespeare and Frost and Chaucer and the poets of the Harlem Renaissance. I'd come to appreciate how gorgeous the English language could be. But most fantasy novels didn't seem to make the effort.

In my own writing, I think of myself as a realist who exaggerates a little.

Prose is all about embellishing and describing.

When I was in college, I did do some writing of poetry, somewhat inspired, I think at that time, by Carl Sandburg, because English was still relatively new to me, and Sandburg, of course, wrote in a very easy-to-understand, very colloquial and informal manner.

In poetry, you must love the words, the ideas and the images and rhythms with all your capacity to love anything at all.

There's a level at which, if you take poetry seriously, the focus it involves... that never goes away.

The business of the poet is not to find new emotions, but to use the ordinary ones and, in working them up into poetry, to express feelings which are not in actual emotions at all.

Jigging veins of rhyming mother wits.

The web, then, or the pattern, a web at once sensuous and logical, an elegant and pregnant texture: that is style, that is the foundation of the art of literature.

I'm a very conceptual writer.

I would never write a sentence that didn't have a nice rhythm, or at least I wouldn't leave it to be published like that. It seems to me that prose mustn't be prosaic.

A tendency to make metaphorical connections is an occupational hazard for those of us who write.

My fiction has been influenced by the visual arts, though not in obvious ways, it seems to me. I don't offer tremendous amounts of visual information in my work.

I've got to hear the rhythm of the sentences; I want the music of the prose. I want to see ordinary things transformed not by the circumstances in which I see them but by the language with which they're described. That's what I love when I read.

The ability to have somebody read something and see it, or for somebody to paint an entire landscape of visual imagery with just sheets of words - that's magical. That's what I've been trying to strive for - to draw a clear picture, to open up a new dimension.

I look for poetry in English because it's the only language I read.

Always be a poet, even in prose.

Works of imagination should be written in very plain language; the more purely imaginative they are the more necessary it is to be plain.

I wish our clever young poets would remember my homely definitions of prose and poetry; that is, prose = words in their best order; - poetry = the best words in the best order.

Ray Bradbury taught me the importance of metaphor and simile and poetic style.

I guess I have a weird habit of writing body part metaphors.

I like bringing my poet brain and sensibility to lyrics I write.

I've grown up on a diet of metaphors. If young writers would find those writers who can give them metaphors by the bushel and the peck, then they'll become better writers - to learn how to capsualize things and present them in metaphorical form.