It’s not easy to define poetry.

Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.

I kept writing not because I felt I was so good, but because I felt they were so bad, including Shakespeare, all those. The stilted formalism, like chewing cardboard.

I didn’t want to be a writer, but I became one. And now I have many readers, in many countries. I think that’s a miracle. So I think I have to be humble regarding this ability. I’m proud of it and I enjoy it, and it is strange to say it this way, but I respect it.

In college, I think I probably positioned myself as an aspiring writer, meaning I dressed sort of extravagantly and adopted all the semi-Byronic affectations, as if I were writing, although I wasn’t actually doing any writing.

Beautiful music is the art of the prophets that can calm the agitations of the soul; it is one of the most magnificent and delightful presents God has given us.

I don’t think I’ve ever read poetry, ever. I’m not really book-smart.

Nine-tenths of the existing books are nonsense and the clever books are the refutation of that nonsense.

Books that you carry to the fire, and hold readily in your hand, are most useful after all.

As far as I’m concerned, I’m a writer who’s writing books, and therefore, I don’t want to die. You’d miss the end of the book wouldn’t you? You can’t die with an unfinished book.

The world is mud-luscious and puddle-wonderful.

Your manuscript is both good and original; but the part that is good is not original, and the part that is original is not good.

I don’t think of poetry as a ‚rational‘ activity but as an aural one. My poems usually begin with words or phrases which appeal more because of their sound than their meaning, and the movement and phrasing of a poem are very important to me.

You’re not going to make Hemingway better by adding animations.

In art, at a certain level, there is no ‚better than.‘ It’s just about trying to operate for yourself on the most supreme level, artistically, that you can and hoping that people get it.

What do we, as a nation, care about books? How much do you think we spend altogether on our libraries, public or private, as compared with what we spend on our horses?

If you’re waiting for the perfect moment, you’ll never write a thing because it will never arrive. I have no routine. I have no foolproof anything. There’s nothing foolproof.

Writing is like a ‚lust,‘ or like ‚scratching when you itch.‘ Writing comes as a result of a very strong impulse, and when it does come, I, for one, must get it out.

I’m the only person you’ve ever met who has read Longfellow.

Ideally a book would have no order to it, and the reader would have to discover his own.

The gross heathenism of civilization has generally destroyed nature, and poetry, and all that is spiritual.

Homer has taught all other poets the art of telling lies skillfully.

All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling.

Genres aren’t closed boxes. Stuff flows back and forth across the borders all the time.

Acting is nothing more or less than playing. The idea is to humanize life.

Were I called on to define, very briefly, the term Art, I should call it ‚the reproduction of what the Senses perceive in Nature through the veil of the soul.‘ The mere imitation, however accurate, of what is in Nature, entitles no man to the sacred name of ‚Artist.‘

If one could be friendly with women, what a pleasure – the relationship so secret and private compared with relations with men. Why not write about it truthfully?

Thirty-three-years-old, still creating art. It’s rage, it’s creativity, it’s pain, it’s hurt, but it’s the opportunity to still have my voice get out there through music.

The art which we may call generally art of the wayside, as opposed to that which is the business of men’s lives, is, in the best sense of the word, Grotesque.

I spent three days a week for 10 years educating myself in the public library, and it’s better than college. People should educate themselves – you can get a complete education for no money. At the end of 10 years, I had read every book in the library and I’d written a thousand stories.

Nothing induces me to read a novel except when I have to make money by writing about it. I detest them.

I had my jazz club and I had enough money. So I didn’t have to write for my living.

Religion is essentially the art and the theory of the remaking of man. Man is not a finished creation.

If I’d written all the truth I knew for the past ten years, about 600 people – including me – would be rotting in prison cells from Rio to Seattle today. Absolute truth is a very rare and dangerous commodity in the context of professional journalism.

Sometimes I’ll jot a clever turn of phrase down. Sometimes I’ll just remember it.

A work of art is the unique result of a unique temperament.

Most rock journalism is people who can’t write, interviewing people who can’t talk, for people who can’t read.

I have written a book. This will come as quite a shock to some. They didn’t think I could read, much less write.

There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.

I think a poet is anybody who wouldn’t call himself a poet.

O, you men who think or say that I am malevolent, stubborn or misanthropic, how greatly do you wrong me. You do not know the secret cause which makes me seem that way to you, and I would have ended my life – it was only my art that held me back. Ah, it seemed impossible to leave the world until I had brought forth all that I felt was within me.

Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars – mere globs of gas atoms. I, too, can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more?

I have made this letter longer than usual, only because I have not had the time to make it shorter.

I’m not going to get into the ring with Tolstoy.

All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players: they have their exits and their entrances; and one man in his time plays many parts, his acts being seven ages.

In a budget, how important is art versus music versus athletics versus computer programming? At the end of the day, some of those trade-offs will be made politically.

Every man lives in two realms: the internal and the external. The internal is that realm of spiritual ends expressed in art, literature, morals, and religion. The external is that complex of devices, techniques, mechanisms, and instrumentalities by means of which we live.

All my stories are like the Greek and Roman myths, and the Egyptian myths, and the Old and New Testament.

I like the language in Proust but not the context.

A truly good book teaches me better than to read it. I must soon lay it down, and commence living on its hint. What I began by reading, I must finish by acting.

Who is more to be pitied, a writer bound and gagged by policemen or one living in perfect freedom who has nothing more to say?

When I write, the story is always uppermost in my mind, and I feel that everything must be sacrificed to it. All elegant passages, all the curious details, all the so-called beautiful writing – if they are not truly relevant to what I am trying to say, then they have to go.

I can remember being home from school with tonsillitis and writing stories in bed to pass the time.

Verbosity leads to unclear, inarticulate things.

Books are the treasured wealth of the world and the fit inheritance of generations and nations.

Wherever you write is supposed to be a little bit of a refuge, a place where you can get away from the world. The more closed in you are, the more you’re forced back on your own imagination.

Don’t only practice your art, but force your way into its secrets; art deserves that, for it and knowledge can raise man to the Divine.

In all seriousness, people think that it’s the ideas that are important. Well, everyone has ideas, all the time. I tend to write mine down and remember them, but at some point you have to apply the bum to the seat and knock out about sixty five thousand words – that’s how long a novel is.

To write it, it took three months; to conceive it three minutes; to collect the data in it all my life.

The myth that everyone once read great literature is just a myth.

Songwriting is my way of channeling my feelings and my thoughts. Not just mine, but the things I see, the people I care about. My head would explode if I didn’t get some of that stuff out.