1,322 quotes found
“With fiction, I tend to get to my desk and start writing. Poetry I write in my head, often while walking, so that my poems have an organic quality, hopefully.”
“I started writing poetry as a teenager in suburban Chicago out of emotional desperation.”
“You know that thing people say, 'poetry is the hardest, stories are the second hardest, novels are the easiest?' I'm here to tell you that novels are the hardest. Writing a novel is unbelievably di...”
“I really enjoy English and poetry and writing classes.”
“Gregory Corso used to get really pissed when people called Bob Dylan a 'poet.' After writing poetry for a few years, I can understand that.”
“When I was writing pretty poor poetry, this girl with midnight black hair told me to go on.”
“When I taught at the University of Houston in the Creative Writing program, we required the poets to take workshops in fiction writing, and we required the fiction writers to take workshops in poetry.”
“Unfortunately, poetry is not born in noise, in crowds, or on a bus. There have to be four walls and the certainty that the telephone will not ring. That's what writing is all about.”
“You know, I can imagine not writing a novel and writing poetry only.”
“When I started writing poetry, it was always in very hip-hop influenced spaces: Someone would teach a Nas song side-by-side with a Gwendolyn Brooks poem, and we'd talk about the connections between...”
“I think that it's more likely that in my 60s and 70s I will be writing poetry rather than fiction.”
“The Language Poets are writing only about language itself. The Ashbery poets are writing only about poetry itself. That seems to me a kind of dead end.”
“Teaching writing over the years intrudes on your own writing in important ways, taking away some of the excitement of poetry.”
“I don't think the creative writing industry has helped American poetry.”
“Some people swear by writing courses, but whether it really helps American poetry, I have doubts.”
“I'm not a writer. I think I can write short stories and poetry, but film writing, brilliant film writing, is a talent - you can't just do it like that.”
“I used to write sonnets and various things, and moved from there into writing prose, which, incidentally, is a lot more interesting than poetry, including the rhythms of prose.”
“I started writing because there's an absence of things I was familiar with or that I dreamed about. One of my senses of anger is related to this vacancy - a yearning I had as a teenager... and when...”
“If you're writing about angry people, you use the language of anger. If you're writing about desperate people, you use the language of desperation.”
“I did not think that I was angry, but clearly anger was reflected in my writing. I did not think that I had been affected emotionally, but it was clear from my writing that I was still very emotion...”
