The more transparent the writing, the more visible the poetry.
The wonderful thing about a book is that you have a canvas that is 300 pages wide, and it's all free space. You can make a piece of art as big as you want and whatever shape you want.
Now I began to understand art as a kind of black box the reader enters. He enters in one state of mind and exits in another. The writer gets no points just because what's inside the box bears some linear resemblance to "real life" -- he can put whatever he wants in there. What's important is that something undeniable and nontrivial happens to the reader between entry and exit.
Who casts to write a living line, must sweat.
For me, writing essays, prose and fiction is a great way to be self-indulgent.
Writing is an act of faith, not a trick of grammar.
Literature... is the union of suffering with the instinct for form.
A poet is a professional maker of verbal objects.
It's my own personal unconscious that ultimately creates the novel's aesthetic facade.
Stories that can be told through language and words don't need to be filmed.
One reason I've never been a fan of graphic novels is because a central aspect of literature for me has always been imagining what the things I'm reading about look like.
Poetry is either language lit up by life or life lit up by language
Poetry is the statement of a relation between a man and the world
A poem begins in delight and ends in wisdom.
When writing, I'm not thinking about war, even if I'm writing about it. I'm thinking about sentences, rhythm and story. So the focus, when I'm working, even if it's on a story that takes place at war, is not on bombs or bullets. It's on the story.
Fiction is the truth inside the lie.
I would rather write poems than prose, any day, any place. Yet each has its own force.
POETRY, n. A form of expression peculiar to the Land beyond the Magazines.
A writer is an artist. They're creating things out of thin air.
Poetry, which is written while no one is looking, is meant to be looked at for all time.
I wanted to become a writer and felt that poetry was perfected language, so having it in my subconscious mind would make the music of language always available to me.
I don't feel like a celebrity. Poetry justifies celebrity. It's good to have respect for a poet.
I've always wanted to write poems and nothing else.
You should write because you love the shape of stories and sentences and the creation of different words on a page. Writing comes from reading, and reading is the finest teacher of how to write.
Writing is a concentrated form of thinking...a young writer sees that with words he can place himself more clearly into the world. Words on a page, that's all it takes to help him separate himself from the forces around him, streets and people and pressures and feelings. He learns to think about these things, to ride his own sentences into new perceptions.
