Language as Art Quotes

I have my own language and it's high time I put a little of it out there.

Words are my passion / And out of them and me / I would create beauty.

My inspiration came especially in the 1950s through the Vienna Group founded by writer H.C. Artmann. It showed me that if you want to say something, you have to let the language itself say it, because language is usually more meaningful than the mere content that one wishes to convey.

There is no point where art so nearly touches nature as when it appears in the form of words.

The writer's language is to some degree the product of his own action; he is both the historian and the agent of his own language.

I became aesthetically obsessed with language. And 'literary artist' - poet and novelist - is a calling. You are called to it the way preachers are called to preaching the gospel.

Language is an art, like brewing or baking.... It certainly is not a true instinct, for every language has to be learnt.

The pure work implies the disappearance of the poet as speaker, who hands over to the words.

But poetry is a way of language, it is not its subject or its maker's background or interests or hobbies or fixations. It is nearer to utterance than history.