Stanley Kunitz Quotes

39 quotes in 525 categories

• Writer's block is a natural affliction. Writers who have never experienced it have something wrong with them. It means there isn't enough friction-that they aren't…
• Deftly they opened the brain of a child, and it was full of flying dreams.
• In every house of marriage there's room for an interpreter.
• To conquer a piece of earth and make it as beautiful as one can dream of it being: That is art, too. A man cannot…
• I dropped my hoe and ran into the house and started to write this poem, 'End of Summer.’ It began as a celebration of wild…
• Not that you need to be a saint to have visions worth talking about. The most effective prescription, I suspect, is to be a disciplined…
• I want to write poems that are natural, luminous, deep, spare. I dream of an art so transparent that you can look through and see…
• Some poems present themselves as cliffs that need to be climbed. Others are so defensive that when you approach their enclosure you half expect to…
• The first task of the poet is to create the person who will write the poems.
• Poetry is ultimately mythology, the telling of stories of the soul. The old myths, the old gods, the old heroes have never died. They are…
• We have to learn how to live with our frailties. The best people I know are inadequate and unashamed.
• A poem has secrets that the poet knows nothing of.
• The unconscious creates, the ego edits.
• My mother never forgave my father
• Rhythm to me is essentially what Hopkins called the taste of self. I taste myself as rhythm.
• I dance/for the joy of surviving, at the edge of the road.
• I like an ending that's both a door and a window.
• The poem in the head is always perfect. Resistance begins when you try to convert it into language.
• The supreme morality of art is to endure.
• Poetry is language surprised in the act of changing into meaning.

Browse Stanley Kunitz Quotes by Category