163 quotes found
"For her, this was always a blissful time of day. She knew he didn't want to speak much until the first drink was finished, and she, on her side, was content to sit quietly, enjoying his company after the long hours alone in the house. She loved to luxuriate in the presence of this man, and to feel-almost as a sunbather feels the sun-that warm male glow that came out of him to her when they were alone together. She loved him for the way he sat loosely in a chair, for the way he came in a door, or moved slowly across the room with long strides. She loved the intent, far look in his eyes when they rested in her, the funny shape of the mouth, and especially the way he remained silent about his tiredness, sitting still with himself until the whiskey had taken some of it away."
"Must Israel, like Germany, be brought to her knees before she learns how to behave in this world?"
"Never before in the history of man has a race of people switched rapidly from being much pitied victims to barbarous murderers. Never before has a race of people generated so much sympathy around the world and then, in the space of a lifetime, succeeded in turning that sympathy into hatred and revulsion."
"[Closing comments] Now is the time for the Jews of the world to follow the example of the Germans and become anti-Israeli. But do they have the conscience? And do they, I wonder, have the guts?"
"[M]akes one wonder in the end what sort of people these Israelis are. It is like the good old Hitler and Himmler times all over again."
"[Responding to criticism as to how he ended his Literary Review article] Perhaps I shouldn't have said that, but it came from my wartime experience [in the RAF], we saw almost none of them in the armed forces then. I mean if you and I were in a line moving towards what we knew were gas chambers I’d rather have a go at taking one of the guards with me; but they were always submissive."
"This I did not dare to say, but there is a trait in the Jewish character that does provoke animosity, maybe it's a kind of lack of generosity towards non-Jews. I mean Hitler, I mean there’s always a reason why anti-anything crops up anywhere; even a stinker like Hitler didn't just pick on them for no reason..."
"A person is a fool to become a writer. His only compensation is absolute freedom. He has no master except his own soul and that, I am sure, is why he does it."
"It was all this, I think, that made me begin to have doubts about religion and even about God. If this person, I kept telling myself, was one of God’s chosen salesmen on earth, then there must be something very wrong about the whole business."
"I find that the only way to make my characters really interesting is to exaggerate all their good or bad qualities and so if a person is nasty or bad or cruel, you make them very nasty and very bad and very cruel. And if they're ugly, you make them extremely ugly. That I think is fun and makes an impact."
"It began in 1982 when the Israelis invaded Lebanon. They killed 22,000 civilians when they bombed Beirut. It was very much hushed up in the newspapers because they are primarily Jewish-owned. I’m certainly anti-Israeli and I’ve become anti-Semitic in as much as that you get a Jewish person in another country like England strongly supporting Zionism. I think they should see both sides. It’s the same old thing: we all know about Jews and the rest of it. There aren’t any non-Jewish publishers anywhere, they control the media – jolly clever thing to do – that’s why the president of the United States has to sell all this stuff to Israel ..."
"You know, I'm not frightened. It's just that I will miss you all so much."
"There's enough chocolate in there to fill every bathtub in the entire country! And all the swimming pools as well!"
"“We must hurry!” said Mr. Wonka. “We have so much time and so little to do! No! Wait! Strike that! Reverse it!”"
"It is very difficult to phone people in China, Mr. President," said the Postmaster General. "The country is so full of Wings and Wongs, every time you wing you get the wong number."
"“Hooray!” said the Chief of the Army. “Let's blow everyone up! Bang-bang! Bang-bang!”"
"“It soon began to dawn on me He wasn’t very bright, Because when he was twenty-three He couldn’t read or write. ‘What shall we do?’ his parents sob. ‘The boy has got the vapors! He couldn’t even get a job Delivering the papers!’ ‘Ah-ha,’ I said, ‘this little clot Could be a politician.’ ‘Nanny,’ he cried, ‘Oh Nanny, what A super proposition!’ ‘Okay,’ I said, ‘let’s learn and note The art of politics. Let’s teach you how to miss the boat And how to drop some bricks, And how to win the people’s vote And lots of other tricks. Let’s learn to make a speech a day Upon the T.V. screen, In which you never never say Exactly what you mean. And most important, by the way, Is not to let your teeth decay, And keep your fingers clean.’ And now that I am eighty-nine, It’s too late to repent. The fault was mine the little swine Became the President.”"
"“I’m afraid the camera got smashed against the side of the Space Hotel, Mr. President,” Shuckworth replied. The President said a very rude word into the microphone and ten million children across the nation began repeating it gleefully and got smacked by their parents."
""A little nonsense now and then, is cherished by the wisest men.”"
"Grown-ups are quirky creatures, full of quirks and secrets."
"A Message to Children Who Have Read This Book - When you grow up and have children of your own, do please remember something important: a stodgy parent is no fun at all. What a child wants and deserves is a parent who is SPARKY."
"I began to realize how important it was to be an enthusiast in life. If you are interested in something, no matter what it is, go at it full speed ahead. Embrace it with both arms, hug it, love it and above all become passionate about it. Lukewarm is no good. Hot is no good, either. White hot and passionate is the only thing to be."
"The matter with human beans," the BFG went on, "is that they is absolutely refusing to believe in anything unless they is actually seeing it right in front of their own schnozzles."
""This is the repulsant snozzcumber! I squoggle it! I mispise it! I dispunge it! But if I is refusing to guzzle up human beans like the other giants, I must spend my life guzzling up icky-poo snozzcumbers instead. Or else I will be nothing but skin and groans"."
"“Words,” he said, “is oh such a twitch-tickling problem to me all my life. So you must simply try to be patient and stop squibbling. As I am telling you before, I know exactly what words I is wanting to say, but somehow or other they is always getting squiff-squiddled around.” “That happens to everyone,” Sophie said. “Not like it happens to me,” the B.F.G. said. “I is speaking the most terrible wigglish.” “I think you speak beautifully,” Sophie said. “You do?” cried the B.F.G., suddenly brightening. “You really do?” “Simply beautifully,” Sophie repeated. “Well that is the nicest present anyone is ever giving me in my whole life!” cried the B.F.G. “Are you sure you is not twiddling my leg?” “Of course not,” Sophie said. “I just love the way you talk". “How wondercrump!” cried the B.F.G., still beaming. “How whoopsy-splunkers! How absolutely squiffling! I is all of a stutter.”"
"Dreams is very mystical things," the BFG said. "Human beans is not understanding them at all. Not even their brainiest professors is understanding them."
"Ah, but they is not killing their own kind," the BFG said. "Human beans is the only animals that is killing their own kind."
"One right is not making two lefts."
"It doesn't matter who you are or what you look like so long as somebody loves you."
"Little Billy’s mother was always telling him exactly what he was allowed to do and what he was not allowed to do. All the things he was allowed to do were boring. All the things he was not allowed to do were exciting. One of the things he NEVER NEVER was allowed to do, the most exciting of them all, was to go out through the garden gate all by himself and explore the world beyond."
"And above all, watch with glittering eyes the whole world around you because the greatest secrets are always hidden in the most unlikely places. Those who don't believe in magic will never find it."
"My candle burns at both ends; It will not last the night; But, ah, my foes, and, oh, my friends — It gives a lovely light."
"[Initially referring to Dahl's attitude towards Jews.] This raises the question whether this is a man whose fictions should be allowed into our children's minds. But the point is that, as he hides himself away in his hit to play with the slapstick-horrific side of a child's imagination, he also sloughs off the world. Israel, his own life, modern novelists all slip away, leaving him to create in peace and innocence. He says he does not even observe his four grand children for inspiration — it all comes over him in the hut. But this dissociation is not as neat as Dahl would like to believe. His own childhood traumas and adult misanthropy are all too obviously present in the books — passages from his autobiography read precisely like one of his stories. Life and Dahl's art do walk hand in hand, even if he has no desire or obligation to ponder the fact. The stories are not the detached fantasies he imagines. They are anti-authoritarian tracts. And the truth is that Dahl himself should disapprove of his own books, for all his attitudes are those of a hard authoritarian, disgusted by indiscipline, television and all the other seductions of the modern world."
"[After his comments to Michael Coren in the 1983 interview cited above] Firmly but not rudely I told him that my father was Jewish, that my grandfather had won all sorts of medals in North Africa and Europe, that Jews fought in enormous numbers in all of the Allied armies, were often over- rather than under-represented, and that this slimy canard of Jewish cowardice was beneath him. At which point he coughed, mumbled something about "sticking together", and then promptly ended the interview."
"There was never any apology from Dahl, clearly because he thought that there was nothing to be sorry about. The paragraph of contrition on his official website took a very long time to come, and while my interview has been quoted every few years, Dahl’s reputation has hardly been trashed."
"The Dahl family and the Roald Dahl Story Company deeply apologise for the lasting and understandable hurt caused by some of Roald Dahl's statements. Those prejudiced remarks are incomprehensible to us and stand in marked contrast to the man we knew and to the values at the heart of Roald Dahl's stories, which have positively impacted young people for generations. We hope that, just as he did at his best, at his absolute worst, Roald Dahl can help remind us of the lasting impact of words."
"No matter how you spin it – and at times Donald Sturrock spins quite hard – Roald Dahl was an absolute sod. Crashing through life like a big, bad child he managed to alienate pretty much everyone he ever met with his grandiosity, dishonesty and spite. Tempered by the desire to be very wealthy, he was able to finesse this native nastiness into a series of compelling books for children who loved to see their anarchic inner world caught on paper."
"My mother is English, and as she was the one who read to us, my early world was A. A. Milne, Beatrix Potter, Kenneth Grahame, Lewis Carroll and Roald Dahl. None of them thought it necessary to protect children from darkness. On the contrary, they guided their readers right toward it. This gives one an enormous sense of being respected as a child. Not just of being trusted to handle things as they are, but to be accepted as not entirely good. To be recognized as having darkness within oneself, too."
"In the original text of Matilda, there is a fantasy section where the heroine "goes on olden-day sailing ships with Joseph Conrad. She went to Africa with Ernest Hemingway, and India with Rudyard Kipling." That has now been changed, so that Matilda goes to "nineteenth century estates with Jane Austen. She went to Africa with Ernest Hemingway, and California with John Steinbeck." I know why these have been changed. Austen is there so the authorial names aren't all men, and Kipling has been swapped for Steinbeck, as Rudyard is associated with British colonialism. But here’s the problem. Nineteenth century estates, like the ones Austen wrote about, were mainly financed by the slave trade. John Steinbeck has been portrayed as a violent misogynist by his first wife. And Hemingway, who survived the sensitivity edit, was also a misogynist, and a mad trophy-hunter of magnificent wild animals. Oh, and by the way, a writer who describes a central character in The Sun Also Rises, as a "rich Jew" and a "kike". Point being, if you dig deep enough, everyone, especially great writers and artists, is problematic. But in a universe where – sorry to say it - Jews don't count, some problems are, it seems bigger than others. These good progressive people making these edits deleting Kipling and Conrad because of their historically sinful associations are doing so to buff up the legacy of – I’m going to put this in italics - Roald Dahl."
"When I think back over the most memorable parts of Dahl's work, it’s always the nastiness that lingers. ... The awful married couple at the center of The Twits subject each other to a campaign of relentless psychological harassment. The message of George’s Marvelous Medicine is "Why not brew up all the chemicals you can find in your house and feed the resulting concoction to your grandmother?" This is not an easy fit for an era when peanut packets carry a warning that they contain nuts."
"A few edits, though, are so contrary to the spirit of Dahl that they feel like a violation. In The Witches, for example, the protagonist's grandmother warns him to watch out for the evil women who rule the world. They are bald, and cover this up with wigs, as well as hiding their claws under gloves. The grandmother used to say: "You can't go round pulling the hair of every lady you meet, even if she is wearing gloves. Just you try it and see what happens." Instead, in the 2022 Puffin edition, she warns the youngster that "there are plenty of other reasons why women might wear wigs and there is certainly nothing wrong with that.""
"Daughter and son became gleeful co-conspirators (and devout readers) of this remarkable writer, a World War II fighter pilot who once, having suffered a fractured skull in a crash, crawled away from the burning wreckage of his aircraft in a hail of machine-gun fire unleashed by the heat. After that, you could surely forgive Dahl a certain impatience with polite, adult society, and a mockingly macabre attitude to life, and death. No such tolerance is to be extended, however, by po-faced Puffin. The publisher, for whom Dahl continues to make a fortune, has unleashed "sensitivity readers" – the cultural vandals formerly known as "censors" – on his work. As the Telegraph revealed, hundreds of changes have been made in Dahl's books despite ample evidence that millions of kids have grown up pretty well after being exposed to the trauma of words such as "ladies and gentlemen" (now rendered as "folks". Ugh), "fat", "hag" and "black" (even when it's the colour of a tractor, not a person, bizarrely)."
"Roald Dahl was no angel but this is absurd censorship. Puffin Books and the Dahl estate should be ashamed."
"He was a self confessed antisemite, with pronounced racist leanings, and he joined in the attack on me back in 1989 ... but thanks for telling me off for defending his work from the bowdlerizing Sensitivity Police."
"When it comes to our rich and varied literary heritage, the prime minister agrees with the BFG that we shouldn’t gobblefunk around with words. I think it's important that works of literature and works of fiction are preserved and not airbrushed. We have always defended the right to free speech and expression."
"No se puede vivir sin amar."
"Though tragedy was in the process of becoming unreal and meaningless it seemed one was still permitted to remember the days when an individual life held some value and was not a mere misprint in a communiqué."
"There was no mistaking, even in the uncertain light, the hand, half crabbed, half generous, and wholly drunken, of the Consul himself, the Greek e’s, the flying buttresses of d’s, the t’s like lonely wayside crosses save where they crucified an entire word."
"The howling pariah dogs, the cocks that herald dawn all night, the drumming, the moaning that will be found later white plumage huddled on telegraph wires in back gardens or fowl roosting in apple trees, the eternal sorrow that never sleeps of great Mexico."
"And this is how I sometimes think of myself, as a great explorer who has discovered some extraordinary land from which he can never return to give his knowledge to the world: but the name of this land is hell."
"What beauty can compare to that of a cantina in the early morning?"
"For a time they confronted each other like two mute unspeaking forts."
"How shall the murdered man convince his assassin he will not haunt him."
"But my lord, Yvonne, surely you know by this time I can’t get drunk however much I drink."
"Nothing in the world was more terrible than an empty bottle! Unless it was an empty glass."
"The will of man is unconquerable. Even God cannot conquer it."
"There was something in the wild strength of this landscape, once a battlefield, that seemed to be shouting at him, a presence born of that strength whose cry his whole being recognized as familiar, caught and threw back into the wind, some youthful passage of courage and pride — the passionate, yet so nearly always hypocritical, affirmation of one’s soul perhaps, he thought, of the desire to be, to do, good, what was right."
"In the final analysis there was no one you could trust to drink with you to the bottom of the bowl."
"He had peered out at the garden, and it was as though bits of his eyelids had broken off and were flittering and jittering before him, turning into nervous shapes and shadows, jumping to the guilty chattering in his mind, not quite voices yet, but they were coming back, they were coming back; a picture of his soul as a town appeared once more before him, but this time a town ravaged and stricken in the black path of his excess and shutting his burning eyes he had thought of the beautiful functioning of the system in those who were truly alive, switches connected, nerves rigid only in real danger, and in nightmareless sleep now calm, not resting, yet poised: a peaceful village."
"In the war to come correspondents would assume unheard of importance, plunging through flame to feed the public its little gobbets of dehydrated excrement."
"Yes, I do love you, I have all the love in the world left for you, only that love seems so far away from me and so strange too, for it is as though I could almost hear it, a droning or weeping, but far, far away, and a sad lost sound, it might be either approaching or receding, I can’t tell which."
"And how could he know whether it was a good omen or not without another drink?"
"There was no callousness in their faces, no cruelty. Death they knew, better than the law, and their memories were long. They sat ranked now, motionless, frozen, discussing nothing, without a word, turned to stone. It was natural to have left the matter to the men. And yet, in these old women it was as if, through the various tragedies of Mexican history, pity, the impulse to approach, and terror, the impulse to escape (as one had learned at college), having replaced it, had finally been reconciled by prudence, the conviction it is better to stay where you are."
"The poor old creature seemed now indeed like someone being drawn, lured, into events of which he has no real comprehension, by people with whom he wishes to be friendly, even to play, who entice him by encouraging that wish and by whom, because they really despise and desire to humilate him, he is finally entangled."
"What is man but a little soul holding up a corpse?"
"Suddenly he saw them, the bottles of aguardiente, of anís, of jerez, of Highland Queen, the glasses, a babel of glasses—towering, like the smoke from the train that day—built to the sky, then falling, the glasses toppling and crashing, falling downhill from the Generalife Gardens, the bottles breaking, bottles of Oporto, tinto, blanco, bottles of Pernod, Oxygènée, absinthe, bottles smashing, bottles cast aside, falling with a thud on the ground in parks, under benches, beds, cinema seats, hidden in drawers at Consulates, bottles of Calvados dropped and broken, or bursting into smithereens, tossed into garbage heaps, flung into the sea, the Mediterranean, the Caspian, the Caribbean, bottles floating in the ocean, dead Scotchmen on the Atlantic highlands—and now he saw them, smelt them, all, from the very beginning—bottles, bottles, bottles, and glasses, glasses, glasses, of bitter, of Dubonnet, of Falstaff, Rye, Johnny Walker, Vieux Whiskey blanc Canadien, the apéritifs, the digestifs, the demis, the dobles, the noch ein Herr Obers, the et glas Araks, the tusen taks, the bottles, the bottles, the beautiful bottles of tequila, and the gourds, gourds, gourds, the millions of gourds of beautiful mescal . . ."
"God, how pointless and empty the world is! Days filled with cheap and tarnished moments succeed each other, restless and haunted nights follow in bitter routine: the sun shines without brightness, and the moon rises without light."
"I want your life filling and stirring me. I want your happiness beneath my heart and your sorrows in my eyes and your peace in the fingers of my hand."
"I wake to a darkness in which I must follow myself endlessly, hating the I who so eternally pursues and confronts me. If we could rise from our misery, seek each other once more, and find again the solace of each other’s lips and eyes."
"How alike are the groans of love, to those of the dying."
"What for you lie?" the Chief of Rostrums repeated in a glowering voice. "You say your name is Black. No es Black." He shoved him backwards toward the door. "You say you are a wrider." He shoved him again. "You no are a wrider." He pushed the Consul more violently, but the Consul stood his ground. "You are no a de wrider, you are de espider, and we shoota de espiders in Méjico."
"Christ," he remarked, puzzled, "this is a dingy way to die."
"Tonight at noon Supermarkets will advertise 3d EXTRA on everything"
"You will tell me you love me Tonight at noon."
"This is the morning that we burnt a cardboard hat"
"Well I woke up this mornin' it was Christmas Day And the birds were singing the night away I saw my stocking lying on the chair Looked right to the bottom but you weren't there"
"Love is feeling cold in the back of vans Love is a fanclub with only two fans"
"Without you ghost ferries would cross the Mersey manned by skeleton crews"
"Prostitutes in the snow in Canning Street like strange erotic snowmen"
"The daughters of Albion taking the dawn ferry to tomorrow worrying about what happened worrying about what hasn't happened lacing up blue sneakers over brown ankles fastening up brown stockings to blue suspenderbelts"
"GUIN GUINN GUINNESS IS white bird lying unnoticed in a corner splattered feathers blood running merged with the neonsigns in a puddle GUINNESS IS GOOD GUINNESS IS GOOD FOR Masks Masks Masks Masks Masks GUINNESS IS GOOD FOR YOU"
"There's the moon trying to look romantic Moon's too old that's her trouble Aren't we all?"
"Wasn't a bad party really Except for the people"
"The general at the radar screen Rubbed his hands with glee, And grinning pressed the button And started world war three."
"The general at the radar screen he should have got the sack But that wouldn't bring Three thousand million, seven hundred, and sixty-eight people back, Would it?"
"When the busstopped suddenly to avoid damaging a mother and child in the road, the younglady in the greenhat sitting opposite was thrown across me, and not being one to miss an opportunity i started to makelove"
"… i stood up and said it was a pity that the world didn't nearly end every lunchtime and that we could always pretend. …"
"When you are posthumous it is cold and dark and that is why patriots are a bit nuts in the head"
"he thinks about his journey nearly done. One day he'll clock on and never clock off or clock off and never clock on"
"there is a mushroom cloud in the back garden i did i tried to bring in the cat but it simply came to pieces in my hand i did i tried to whitewash the windows but there weren't any"
"it says NO NEWS IS GOOD NEWS but it don't say why."
"My party piece: I strike, then from the moment when the matchstick conjures up its light, to when the brightness moves beyond its means, and dies, I say the story of my life"
"All land lines are down. Reports of mobile phones are false. One half-excoriated Apple Mac still quotes the Dow Jones."
"We walk to the ward from the badly parked car with your grandma taking four short steps to our two. We have brought her here to die and we know it."
"Where does the hand become the wrist? where does the neck become the shoulder? The watershed and then the weight, whatever turns up and tips us over that razor's edge between something and nothing, between one and the other."
"Here's how they rated him when the looked back: sometimes he did this, sometimes he did that."
"I've made out a will: I'm leaving myself to the National Health. I'm sure they can use the jellies and tubes and syrups and glues..."
"Ignite the flares, connect the phones, wind all the clocks; the sun goes rusty like a medal in its box - collect it from the loft. Peg out the stars, replace the bulbs of Jupiter and Mars. A man like that takes something with him when he dies, but he has wept the coins that rested on his eyes, eased out the stopper from the mouthpiece of the cave, exhumed his own white body from the grave."
"Mother, any distance greater than a single span requires a second pair of hands."
"That heart had been an apple once, they reckoned. Green. They had a scheme to plant an apple there again beginning with a pip, but he rejected it."
"Right here you made an angel of yourself, free-falling backwards into last night's snow, indenting a straight, neat, crucified shape, then flapping your arms, one stroke, a great bird, to leave the impression of wings. It worked."
"Think, two things on their own and both at once."
"In a life, most of us turn no more than 45 degrees. Not much compared to those who turn full-circle in the slighest breeze or those who totally uncoil, but enough in the end to tell a bag of diamonds from a sack of coal."
"Boy with the name and face I don't remember, you can stop shouting now, I can still hear you."
"Lifetimes went past. With the critical mass of hardly more than the thought of a thought I kept on, headlong, to vanishing point. I looked for an end, for some dimension to hold hard and resist. But I still exist."
"Bloody men are like bloody buses - You wait for about a year And as soon as one approaches your stop Two or three others appear."
"Poetry carries its history within it, and it is oral in its origins, its transmission was oral."
"Poetry is not a metrical exercise."
"It is not what they built. It is what they knocked down. It is not the houses. It is the spaces between the houses. It is not the streets that exist. It is the streets that no longer exist."
"Yes You have come upon the fabled lands where myths Go when they die, But some, especially the Brummagem capitalist Juju, have arrived prematurely."
"A serious mistake in a nightie, A grave disappointment all round Is all that you'll get from th'Almighty, Is all that you'll get underground. Oh he said: "If you lay off the crumpet I'll see you alright in the end. Just hang on until the last trumpet. Have faith in me, chum – I'm your friend.""
"Windbags can be right. Aphorists can be wrong. It is a tough world."
"The writing of a poem is like a child throwing stones into a mineshaft. You compose first, then you listen for the reverberation."
"Imitation, if it is not forgery, is a fine thing. It stems from a generous impulse, and a realistic sense of what can and cannot be done."
"We are never such kleptomaniacs as in our juvenilia. We steal from our masters. We steal from our friends, from our enemies even. We try out tones of voice for which we are ill suited. We write as if we belong to some other period. We are suckers for gorgeous words such as nenuphar, asphodel, and pelf. And because we are not yet in command of our vehicle we get out of control. We reveal ourselves inadvertently and we inadvertently commit ourselves to some point of view that really isn't "us" at all."
"There is always a nasty surprise in store for the imperial mind. It is typical of the imperial point of view that it is ignorant of, or blind to, the other. The imperial mind keeps missing the point. It fails to appreciate, for all its benevolence, why it might come under attack, why it might, for instance, be worth a nation's while to rise up against it. The imperial mind has to be shocked out of its daydreams."
"Among those today who believe that modern poetry must do without rhyme or metre, there is an assumption that the alternative to free verse is a crash course in villanelles, sestinas and other such fixed forms. But most...are rare in English poetry. Few poets have written a villanelle worth reading, or indeed regret not having done so."
"Tennyson follows his feelings in creating each line. He follows the music in his head. If you had asked him, at the end of the day, to describe the prosody of the poem to you, he would no doubt have had to think for a moment before he could answer you, not because he was ignorant of the terms, but because he had been writing a poem, not a metrical exercise. At every point, he was exerting his free will. And the outcome of that exertion was the form."
"It normally happens that if you put two words together, or two syllables together, one of them will attract more weight, more emphasis, than the other. In other words, most so-called spondees can be read as either iambs or trochees."
"Can the ear hear a thirteen-syllable line as consisting of thirteen syllables? I don't think so, but I think that a series of thirteen-syllable lines (supposing that was the length chosen) would, after a while, begin to have a characteristic resemblance. For the most part, though, counting the syllables seems to be something that works, if it works, for the poet. It is a private method of organization."
"The composer does not want the self-sufficiency of a richly complex text: he or she wants to feel that the text is something in need of musical setting."
"My sonnet asserts that the sonnet still lives. My epic, should such fortune befall me, asserts that the heroic narrative is not lost — that it is born again."
"As poets we do not ask permission before we begin to practise, for there is no authority to license us. We do not inquire whether it is still possible to pen a drama, for the answer to that question is ours alone to give. It is our drama, spoken or sung, that asserts our right to the title of poet. It is our decision that counts, and not the opinion of some theatre management, or the ponderings of the critic, or even the advice of our friendliest mentors."
"A poet educated to his finger tips will tend to be allusive"
"One way of looking at poetic periods is to notice what contemporary interests and knowledge penetrate the best verse written at the time and what moods are permitted in treating of these matters."
"Rhythm includes metre, but metre is a relatively small part of rhythm."
"Good free verse is not at all easy to write, for there is no repetitive beat to lull the reader's critical faculty, much pattern and discipline is to be found in it, though the pattern of sounds and choice of exact words, gives it its beauty."
"Do not despair For Johnny-head-in-air; He sleeps as sound As Johnny underground."
"The Daily Worker has been renamed The Morning Star. I find nothing starry about it. A more informative new title would have been the Daily Striker."
"Well, here I suppose is my life, or part of it, by which I would wish to be judged... poems which have been written from a sense of compulsion, a real need to explore and articulate experiences which have been important to me."
"All I am is in my verse."
"I'm no novelist.Or anything else, I suppose, except, just possibly a poet, once in a while."
"You can find out far more about a writer from his poems or fiction ..because in his stories or poems, his preoccupations, obsessions, moral standards, the quality of his intelligence, his loves, hates, aspirations, belief and fears.. insist on expression."
"The poet , absorbed in the solving of formal problems, the struggle with slippery eels of language, has no time for dissimulation and he tells us more about himself than he knows."
"The great artist may be, outside the confines of his art, cruel, weak, arrogant and foolish, but within them he can transcend his own condition and become noble, passionate and truthful beyond the range of ordinary men."
"I believe one of the functions of language used poetically is to explore experiences and hidden sources of behavior in a way that will not be tedious to the reader."
"In the excitement and rigours of the game or battle with words and shapes, self-interest is mislaid and objective truth may often be revealed."
"As a writer, I must keep writing, poems can never be forced, the muses will not be raped, so I feel this kind of prose (autobiography), however inadequate, share some of the exploratory features of the poetic use of language."
"Past events are not dead but constantly making their claims on the present, modifying it even as they themselves are modified in the maw of subsequent events and in the memory which is part of the shaping of imagination."
"The authentic British poetry of the second world war was not a poetry of protest, still less was it inspired by patriotic enthusiasm"
"The servicemen of the 1939 - 45 war could not be disillusioned because they held not illusions to start with, the most common mood found everywhere was one of dour resolution, skeptical, resigned."
"The best poetry of the second World war written by both British & American servicemen need not fear comparison with the generally more well highly regarded work of the 1914-18 poets."
"All true poets are, of course, primarily concerned with artifact, the making of a verbal construct, a durable work of art."
"Some poets are more deeply involved than others in the raw experience which lies behind the poem and for them the act of composition is an act of self exploration with the definite goal of enlightenment rather than the ideally depersonalized construction of a beautiful and autonomous object."
"Ther poetry of the second World War conveys the true feeling of those desolate and desperate days with an urgency and sense of truth that no other means of recording could emulate."
"The best poetry of WW2 , the most truthful and penetrating, poetry which is rooted in the ground of physical experience, suspicious of the abstract and conforming to the discipline of provenly effective forms."
"Neither Sassoon or Owen were notably exploratory or original in technique ,each developed a style which permitted them to give a full expression to their deepest thoughts & feelings about war."
"The poet's need to try to find his own voice , a recognizable individual voice that carries the signature of his voice in almost every line . . . the unique tone being the consequence of the poet's rigorous search for truth ( his truth(, his absolute fidelity to the nature of the experience he was exploring."
"It is impossible for a poet to fashion the voice deliberately by contrivance and experiment; it could not be discovered or simulated through the cultivation of an eccentric diction or prosody, or by the employment of regional speech rhythms and patterns."
"A word or a phrase or a line is not a poem. A poem is the exploration and shaping of an experience. A real poem demands intelligence, imagination, passion, understanding, experience and not least a knowledge of the craft."
"Whether we are writing prose or verse we must never use language in a merely decorative way, every qualifying word, every adjective and adverb must be carefully inspected & weighed before it is used and ask before its use , is it really necessary."
"The word experiment derives from 'experimentum' - that which has been experienced and what , for the writer , has been experienced is the work of his great predecessors"
"The genuinely innovatory , the truly 'experiential' poetry is always firmly rooted in the achievement of the past."
"The desire of a poet for his writings to be in print is as natural as a painter needs to exhibit his work in public."
"The impulse to create is pure, self sufficient, its own reward or punishment."
"Of my childhood & youth the greater part of which had been spent in an atmosphere of cultural twilight."
"The intellect had rejected the rational basis of belief, yet the imagination & sensibility yearn for simple faith."
"I would say that my aims of writing this book are less concerned with the facts of history than with the truth of art."
"I hope this book will throw a little light on the nature of human coutage and its lack..when the last argument of kings viz cannon or war pursues its loud & murderous course."
"The practice of reading aloud did do something towards attuning my ear .The subtle cadences of Elizabethan blank verse taught me more than the substantial study of English prosody could do at that time."
"I was the living proof of T. S Eliot's assertion that poetry can communicate before it is understood.the conscious,analytical part of my response was lulled into a kind of stupor by the rhythms and richness of the imagery of the poetry I was reading."
"The proper act of reading of a poem was not an act of passive submission but one of collaboration with its author."
"Poetry Archive"