Wordcraft Quotes

A thing said walks in immortality if it has been said well.

Of all fatiguing, futile, empty trades, the worst, I suppose, is writing about writing.

For me, language is something that I've always loved. When I read, that's what I look for. When I write, that's what I strive for.

When students are first at the Kerouac School we harp on Gertrude Stein's very basic poetic insistence that words are things . Not to invalidate your experience or all the great feelings you have, I tell them. Although poetry may be good for you, it's not therapy. You're making something with words which are visceral, muscular, active, not just markers of how you feel. And we have classes studying William Blake, Ezra Pound, Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, Stein.

The advice I continually give to young writers is this, "Learn to paint pictures with words." Not just once upon a time, but ... In the long secret dust of ages, beneath a blue forgotten sky, where trade winds caress the sun bleached shores of unknown realms ... See, as much as there are words in poetry, there is a poetry in words. Use it, stay faithful to the path you have set your heart upon and follow it.

When you work with words, words are your work.

I decided at school that the only sensible way to make a living by arranging words in a pleasing order was by working on newspapers, because you got paid at the end of the week or the end of the month.

When I really want to be soothed and reminded of why people bother to fiddle with sentences, I often read poetry.

The temple of art is built in words.

I work on words, mostly, toward them being poetry or short stories, and then some of those become songs. They all find their place in the world, but they all start off in the same place. I'm always painting and drawing as well, and it's an ongoing creative assignment.

For me the music is a vehicle for my lyrics. It's a chance to get some really good words across.

A writer ... whittles at the words and phrases of today and makes of them forms to set the mind of tomorrow's generation.

Poetry is the communication through words of certain experiences that can be communicated in no other way.

What I like to do is treat words as a craftsman does his wood or stone or what-have-you, to hew, carve, mold, coil, polish, and plane them into patterns, sequences, sculptures, fugues of sound expressing some lyrical impulse, some spiritual doubt or conviction, some dimly realized truth I must try to reach and realize.

I write because I like to make things and the only things I am good at making things with are words.

We wrapped our dreams in words and patterned the words so that they would live forever, unforgettable.

Words are the raw material out of which literature is crafted.

I have offered myself to the inkwell of the wordsmith that I might be shaped into new terms of being.

I write poems for myself and I write poetry that gets torn apart and becomes songs. I have a lot of respect for words, the power of words.

Fools, art is a heavy task, more heavy than gold crowns; it's far more difficult to match firm words than armies, they're disciplined troops, unconquered, to be placed in rhythm, the mind's most mighty foe, and not disperse in air. I'd give, believe me, a whole land for one good song, for I know well that only words, that words alone, like the high mountains, have no fear of age or death.