“In cutting marble and in drawing with silver point you can’t undo what you have done. So may my writing be. Stet is my slogan. And if it can’t stand let it set.”

Robert Frost

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“Yeats said about writing prose and poetry, that when you finish a poem it clicks shut like the top of a jewel box but prose is endless. I haven’t experienced an awful lot of clicking shut!”

Kenneth Koch

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“A poem, as a manifestation of language and thus essentially dialogue, can be a message in a bottle, sent out in the—not always greatly hopeful—belief that somewhere and sometime it could wash up on land, on heartland perhaps. Poems in this sense too are under way: they are making toward something.”

Paul Celan

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“I was both scattered and stymied, surrounded by unfinished songs and abandoned poems. I would go as far as I could and hit a wall, my own imagined limitations. And then I met a fellow who gave me his secret, and it was pretty simple. When you hit a wall, just kick it in.”

Patti Smith

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“You ask me, most politely, to do something I disapprove—that is, to pluck from Victor Hugo’s writings some fragment that seems to me of especial excellence. I do not at all like this process of detaching from a work the purest or happiest portion of it. Is this not treating poems as children treat cakes—picking out the almonds to crunch and giving the rest to the dog?”

Paul Valéry

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“I used to have a few girlfriends in Chastilian Road days, though it was purely platonic at the time. I always remember one gave me a kiss. We were about six or seven. ‘But keep it dark,’ she said. I still haven’t written that song. Chicks are always miles ahead. Keep it dark!”

Keith Richards

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“I always seem to be trying to do six or seven different poems at the same time and just hoping I can keep them all well-nurtured enough so that one of them will suddenly get strong enough to take over all by itself until it is done.”

Elizabeth Bishop

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“If little poems announce themselves I will open the door; they knock infrequently these days.”

Donald Hall

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“Poetry is a hypodermic injection of passion. It gets under your skin like snake fangs and poisons you into being alive.”

Mary Karr

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“It is difficult to get the news from poems yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there.”

William Carlos Williams

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“If truth is that which lasts, then art has proved truer than any other human endeavor. What is certain is that pictures and poetry and music are not only marks in time but marks through time, of their own time and ours, not antique or historical, but living as they ever did, exuberantly, untired.”

Jeanette Winterson

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“Any minute now I will make a knife out of a cloud.”

W. S. Merwin

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“What I’m really interested in is not what I’ve written but what I haven’t written, the next poem, if there is one.”

W. S. Merwin

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“When things are going well, you do have the sense that what you’re writing is being fed to you in some way. Auden compared writing a poem to cleaning an old piece of slate until the letters appear. The only way you could reveal your god is perhaps under hypnosis. It’s sacred and it’s secret, even to the writer.”

Martin Amis

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“The way to know the shape of things in advance is to listen to seers and mystics instead of to economists and tacticians. The world had ample warning of every event which it has greeted with such gasps of surprise in the past twelve months. Part of the preparation for the perfect world society will be the recognition of seers. It will be required for the President of the United States that he read one poem and one parable or fable a day, in addition to the editorials in the Times.”

E. B. White

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