The function of a book or a poem or a story is to delight…

One poem or story doesn't matter one way or the other. It's the process of writing and life that matters.

— Natalie Goldberg

“Evere since I was first to read, then started reading to myself, there has never been a line read that I didn't hear. As…

— Eudora Welty

“By the time that poem became the story “River of Names,”* I had made the decision to reverse that process: to claim my family,…

— Dorothy Allison

September 2001. A sunny day in New York. Many of us who are writers were at work on the transformation of life into a…

— Nadine Gordimer

A book or poem which has no pity in it had better not be written.

— Oscar Wilde

No book or poem is ever finished, merely abandoned.

— Dan Simmons

“I am a shadow. I walk the wet roads under the dim light of the pale lamps, in the darkest hour of the cold…

— Foaad Ahmad

Another way of saying "put it in the Book" would be that each poem we write pops up in the city of poetry, where…

— Gregory Orr

“My thinking, far from being clearer than a crystal, was tortuous. I would read the same passage over and over again only to realize…

— Kay Redfield Jamison

“A book, a poem, a play — they start as fantasms but they end up as things, like a box of crackers or an…

— Arthur Miller

“As Auden is believed to have said, no poem saved a single Jew from the gas chambers. Never mind. Write the poems anyway. Play…

— Philip Pullman

“The name does not deserve the poem, but the poem deserves the name.”

— Dejan Stojanovic

“sometimes when everything seems at its worst when all conspires and gnaws and the hours, days, weeks years seem wasted – stretched there upon…

— Charles Bukowski

“Whatever you want," he said. "Will you please come here now?" I slipped a piece of protective tissue over my drawing and flipped the…

— Melissa Jensen

You don’t read or overhear the voice in the poem, you are the voice in the poem.

— Helen Vendler