Richard Hugo

“there’s too many people in here. If I had my way, I’d have nothing but young chicks, the innocent ones you can…

— Richard Hugo

I will garden on the double run, my rhythm obvious in the ringing rakes, and trust in fate to keep me poor…

— Richard Hugo

“I fear, trying to improve human nature.”

— Richard Hugo

A poet is seldom hard up for advice. The worst part of it all is that sometimes the advice is coming from…

— Richard Hugo

...an imagined town is at least as real as an actual town. If it isn't, you may be in the wrong business.…

— Richard Hugo

“The imagination is a cynic.”

— Richard Hugo

“…I’ve seen the world tell us with wars and real estate developments and bad politics and odd court decisions that our lives…

— Richard Hugo

An act of imagination is an act of self-acceptance.

— Richard Hugo

A creative writing class may be one of the last places you can go where your life still matters.

— Richard Hugo

Maximum sentence length: seventeen words. Minimum:one No semicolons. Semicolons indicate relationships that only idiots need defined by punctuation. Besides, they are ugly.…

— Richard Hugo

A good creative-writing teacher can save a good writer a lot of time.

— Richard Hugo

“We won’t all disappear on a remote country road in the Monroe Valley, but like The Admiral and his wife we are…

— Richard Hugo

“You might come here Sunday on a whim. Say your life broke down. The last good kiss you had was years ago.…

— Richard Hugo

Assuming you can write clear English sentences, give up all worry about communication. If you want to communicate, use the telephone.

— Richard Hugo

Don't write love poems when you're in love. Write them when you're not in love.

— Richard Hugo

“There are those usual people who try desperately to appear unusual and there are unusual people who try to appear usual.”

— Richard Hugo

“I caution against communication because once language exist only to convey information, it is dying. In news articles the relation of the…

— Richard Hugo

Never write a poem about anything that ought to have a poem written about it.

— Richard Hugo

“I hate that phrase "the real world." Why is an aircraft factory more real than a university? Is it?”

— Richard Hugo

Scholars look for final truths they will never find. Creative writers concern themselves with possibilities that are always there to the receptive.

— Richard Hugo

“I was willingly confused by the times”

— Richard Hugo

“Believe you and I sing tiny and wise and could if we had to eat stone and go on. ”

— RICHARD HUGO

You owe reality nothing and the truth about your feelings everything.

— Richard Hugo

“Hope for what? I don’t know. Maybe hope that humanity will always survive civilization.”

— Richard Hugo

“Never has your Buick / found this forward a gear.”

— Richard Hugo