I have never been one to write by rule, not even by my own rules. — William Carlos Williams Copy Share Image
The only human value of anything, writing included, is intense vision of the facts. — William Carlos Williams Copy Share Image
The better work men do is always done under stress and at great personal cost. — William Carlos Williams Copy Share Image
Afraid lest he be caught up in a net of words, tripped up, bewildered and so defeated-thrown aside-a man hesitates to write… — William Carlos Williams Copy Share Image
Poetry demands a different material than prose. It uses another facet of the same fact … the spontaneous conformation of language as… — William Carlos Williams Copy Share Image
I'll write whatever I damn please, whenever I damn please and as I damn please and it'll be good if the authentic… — William Carlos Williams Copy Share Image
Prose may carry a load of ill-defined matters like a ship. But poetry is the machine which drives it, pruned to a… — William Carlos Williams Copy Share Image
Why do I write today? The beauty of the terrible faces of our nonentities stirs me to it: colored women day workers-… — William Carlos Williams Copy Share Image
“According to my present theme the writer of imagination would attain closest to the conditions of music not when his words are… — William Carlos Williams Copy Share Image
The War is the first and only thing in the world today. The arts generally are not, nor is this writing a… — William Carlos Williams Copy Share Image
Poets are being pursued by the philosophers today, out of the poverty of philosophy. God damn it, you might think a man… — William Carlos Williams Copy Share Image
Let the snake wait under his weed and the writing be of words, slow and quick, sharp to strike, quiet to wait,… — William Carlos Williams Copy Share Image
But the thing that stands eternally in the way of really good writing is always one: the virtual impossibility of lifting to… — William Carlos Williams Copy Share Image
Writing is not a searching about in the daily experience for apt similes and pretty thoughts and images… It is not a… — William Carlos Williams Copy Share Image
“unsignificantly off the coast there was a splash quite unnoticed this was Icarus drowning” — William Carlos Williams Copy Share
“You're a romanticist. What do you think a man is, a papaya? To digest your dinner? In pill form?” — William Carlos Williams Copy Share
Imagination though it cannot wipe out the sting of remorse can instruct the mind in its proper uses. — William Carlos Williams Copy Share
A poem is this:/A nuance of sound/delicately operating/upon a cataract of sense/...the particulars/of a song waking/upon a bed of sound. — William Carlos Williams Copy Share
Prose may carry a load of ill-defined matters like a ship. But poetry is the machine which drives it, pruned to a perfect economy. — William Carlos Williams Copy Share
It is not what you say that matters but the manner in which you say it; there lies the secret of the ages. — William Carlos Williams Copy Share
“And a church spire sketched on the sky, of sheet metal and open beams, to resemble a church spire” — William Carlos Williams Copy Share
