quotes from classic

He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lamp posts - for support rather than for illumination.

more quotes from Andrew Lang

An unsophisticated forecaster uses statistics as a drunken man uses lamp-posts - for support rather than for illumination.

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I don't think the idea of homosexuality is really taboo any more. Our culture is evolving. This is an exciting time to be living.

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Life's more amusing than we thought.

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I have frequently noticed in myself a tendency to a diffuse style; a disposition to push my metaphors too far, employing a multitude of words to heighten the patness of the image, and so making of it a conceit rather than a metaphor, a fault copiously illustrated in the poetry of Cowley, Waller, Donne, and others of that ilk.

more quotes from Sidney Lanier

Gradually I find that my whole soul is merging itself into this business of writing, and especially of writing poetry. I am going to try it; and am going to test, in the most rigid way I know, the awful question whether it is my vocation.

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But I cannot bring myself to believe that I was intended for a musician, because it seems so small a business in comparison with other things which, it seems to me, I might do. Question here: 'What is the province of music in the economy of the world?'

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Man hands on misery to man. It deepens like a coastal shelf. Get out as early as you can, and don't have any kids yourself.

more quotes from Philip Larkin

Life has a practice of living you, if you don't live it.

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Death is no different whined at than withstood.

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They say eyes clear with age.

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The German experience, as you can see, did move me very much. Seeing that terrible destruction and seeing the miserable state of the people, how they had been beaten down by the war through no fault of their own probably.

more quotes from James Laughlin

I think we will always have the impulse towards visual poetry with us, and I wouldn't agree with Bly that it's a bad thing. It depends on the ability of the individual poet to do it well, and to make a shape which is interesting enough to hold your attention.

more quotes from James Laughlin

Every now and then, I strike something that just goes click, you know, in my head. As Gertrude Stein used to say, it rings the bell, and I feel, this is great.

more quotes from James Laughlin

I think there is a great difference, in that when the poet is reading you get the whole personality of the person, especially if he's a good reader. Whereas a person just sitting gets what he puts into it.

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I think one ages and one dates. I tend to have a good deal of difficulty in liking some of the new poets.

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I think there's no excuse for the American poetry reader not knowing a good deal about what is going on in the rest of the world.

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We do very little re-writing in the office. We often take on people who show great promise and who we hope will develop into somebody important and someone good.

more quotes from James Laughlin

I think that concrete poetry seems to have, as far as I can see, come to a kind of a dead end. It doesn't seem to be going any further than it went in its high period of about five or six years ago.

more quotes from James Laughlin

Concrete poets continue to turn out beautiful things, but to me they're more visual than oral, and they almost really belong on the wall rather than in a book. I haven't the least idea of where poetry is going.

more quotes from James Laughlin