475 quotes found
“Family does not mean people with the same last name or the same DNA. It means people who care about you, who you trust, who you care about--people you can count on.”
“the next time you hear someone in a workshop remarking on how good a particular free-verse line or passage sounds, scan it. The odds are that it will fall into a regular metrical pattern.”
“. . .criticism is to poetry as air is to a noise: it allows it to be heard; and even if we can't see it or feel it, it is there, shaping how we hear.”
“If you ask a twenty-one-year-old poet whose poetry he likes, he might say, unblushing, "Nobody's," In his youth, he has not yet understood that poets like poetry, and novelists like novels; he hims...”
“Say you could view a time lapse film of our planet: what would you see? Transparent images moving through light, an infinite storm of beauty.The beginning is swaddled in mists, blasted by random bl...”
“People didn't call blacks names anymore, at least not to their faces. Italians weren't wops or dagos, and there were no more kikes, Japs, chinks, or spics in polite conversation. Everybody had a gr...”
“After the boy at the supermarket had called her those names, Evelyn Couch had felt violated. Raped by words. Stripped of everything. She had always tried to keep this from happening to her, always ...”
“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.”
“The secret is not to write about what you love best, but about what you, alone, love at all.”
“Why are we reading, if not in hope of beauty laid bare, life heightened and its deepest mystery probed? Can the writer isolate and vivify all in experience that most deeply engages our intellects a...”
“And what does helping someone really mean? Helping them to be like everyone else, or helping them to be themselves?”
“I set up and staged hundreds of ends-of-the-world and watched, enthralled, as they played themselves out.”
“Naturally I feel no shame in writing these things because of the time which separates the moment when they are written--when only I can see them--from the moment when they will be read by other peo...”
“For writing a first draft requires from the writer a peculiar internal state which ordinary life does not induce. ... how to set yourself spinning?”
“And that's like my world." Annie pointed up to the stars again."Inaccecible.”
“There is neither a proportional relationship, nor an inverse one, between a writers estimation of a work in progress & its actual quality. The feeling that the work is magnificent, & the feeling th...”
“Lacan wrote about two levels of speaking, one in which we know what we are saying (even when struggling with something difficult or contradictory) and another in which we have no idea of what we ar...”
“Get to work. Your work is to keep cranking the flywheel that turns the gears that spin the belt in the engine of belief that keeps you and your desk in midair.”
“So it is that a writer writes many books. In each book, he intended several urgent and vivid points, many of which he sacrificed as the book's form hardened.”
“We teach our children one thing only, as we were taught: to wake up. We teach our children to look alive there, to join by words and activities the life of human culture on this planet's crust. As ...”
