Philip Levine
“It is the imagination that gives us poetry. When you sit down to write a poem, you really don’t know where you’re going. If you know where you’re going, the poem stinks, you probably already wrote it, and you’re imitating yourself.”
Philip Levine
“I write pieces, and move them around. And the fun of it is watching the truthful parts slide together. What is false won’t fit.”
Elizabeth Strout
“I was very surprised to find out, as my poems pick up more and more of the past of human beings, the ancient culture, more and more of the grief and the suffering of human beings — the poems become funnier! I don’t understand that, but I love it. I feel that there’s some way that as the mind gets more mature, in the midst of a lot of grief, it’s able to dance a little!”
Robert Bly
“There is that great proverb — that until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter. That did not come to me until much later. Once I realized that, I had to be a writer. I had to be that historian. It’s not one man’s job. It’s not one person’s job. But it is something we have to do, so that the story of the hunt will also reflect the agony, the travail — the bravery, even, of the lions.”
Chinua Achebe
“I’ve never known a writer who didn’t feel ill at ease in the world. … We all feel unhoused in some sense. That’s part of why we write. We feel we don’t fit in, that this world is not our world, that though we may move in it, we’re not of it. … You don’t need to write a novel if you feel at home in the world.”
Andrea Barrett
“Words ought to be a little wild for they are the assaults of thought on the unthinking.”
John Maynard Keynes
“Writing has laws of perspective, of light and shade, just as painting does, or music. If you are born knowing them, fine. If not, learn them. Then rearrange the rules to suit yourself.”
Truman Capote