Failure Quote by Dorianne Laux

We aren't suggesting that mental instability or unhappiness makes one a better poet, or a poet at all; and contrary to the romantic notion…

— Dorianne Laux

“How many losses does it take to stop a heart, to lay waste to the vocabularies of desire?”

— Dorianne Laux

And I saw it didn't matter who had loved me or who I loved. I was alone. The black oily asphalt, the slick beauty…

— Dorianne Laux

The reason I started writing was because I was a little kid in San Diego who was getting beaten up by her dad and…

— Dorianne Laux

I would say my life experiences are my poetry, whether I'm writing about those actual, factual experiences or not.

— Dorianne Laux

Good writing works from a simple premise: your experience is not yours alone, but in some sense a metaphor for everyone's.

— Dorianne Laux

Every poem I write falls short in some important way. But I go on trying to write the one that won’t.

— Dorianne Laux

We're all writing out of a wound, and that's where our song comes from. The wound is singing. We're singing back to those who've…

— Dorianne Laux

You are not your poetry. Your self-esteem shouldn't depend on whether you publish, or whether some editor or writer you admire thinks you're any…

— Dorianne Laux

Someone spoke to me last night, told me the truth. Just a few words, but I recognized it. I knew I should make myself…

— Dorianne Laux

It's difficult to talk about [W.S.] Merwin's poems, as it's hard to talk about a feeling or a smell. It is what it is,…

— Dorianne Laux

We continue to speak, if only in whispers, to something inside us that longs to be named.

— Dorianne Laux