10 Writing Quotes

Ten quotes on writing randomly chosen from my notebooks:


"The process of writing will always be trying to repair something that doesn't exist with tools you have to invent on the spot."  George Saunders


"All one's inventions are true, you can be sure of that. Poetry is as exact a science as geometry." Gustav Flaubert


[he’s] “always needed paper and pencil / in order to speaks as little as [he] should.” Stephen Dunn, in “A Brief History of My Silence”

"A badly made thing falls apart. It takes only a few years for most of the energy to leak out of a defective work of art. To put it simply, conservation of energy is the function of form." Stanley Kunitz

"Poetry is not truth but is a game, maybe a tragic game, the game we play with the world that plays its own game with us." Inger Christensen


"Going into hell so many times tears it, which explains poetry." Jack Spicer

"Poetry makes ideas seem real by removing the detritus of fact and substituting something else that is more to the point." Louis Simpson, Ships Going into the Blue, p. 21

"What makes a poem a poem, finally, is that it is unparaphrasable. There is no other way to say exactly this; it exists only in its own body of language, only in these words. . . . Part of what poetry is, I think, is the inner life of the dead, held in suspension. It is still visible to us . . ."   Mark Doty, in Still Life with Oysters and Lemons, p.70


"Write anything. Truth or untruth, it is unimportant. Speak but speak with tenderness, for that is all that you can do that may help a little." John Berger, G.

"Any necessary utterance has an anxiety behind it." James Galvin