AustinGranny.com - Droplets of Ink

When a thing has been said and said well, have no scruple. Take it and copy it.
— Anatole France

When ideas fail, words come in very handy.
— Goethe

The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources.
— Albert Einstein

I have drawers in my mind, so many drawers. I have hundreds of materials in these drawers.
I take out the images and memories that I need.
— Haruki Murakami

I'd like to retire... and do nothing, or nothing much, forever...
look through binoculars, read boring books, old, long, long books,
and write down useless notes, talk to myself, and, foggy days,
watch the droplets slipping, heavy with light.
— Elizabeth Bishop

Man will be blotted out, the blithe earth die, the brave sun
Die blind and blacken to the heart:
Yet stones have stood for a thousand years, and pained thoughts found
The honey of peace in old poems.
— Robinson Jeffers

I always get up and make a cup of coffee while it is still dark —
it must be dark — and then I drink the coffee and watch the light come...
Writers all devise ways to approach that place where they expect
to make the contact, where they become the conduit,
or where they engage in this mysterious process.
For me, light is the signal in the transition. It's not being in the light,
it's being there before it arrives. It enables me, in some sense.
— Toni Morrison

We have a natural right to make use of our pens as of our tongue,
at our peril, risk and hazard.
— Voltaire

The English language is nobody's special property.
It is the property of the imagination.
— Derek Walcott

"What troubles me is a sense that so many things lovely and precious in our world seem to be dying out. Perhaps poetry will be the canary in the mine-shaft warning us of what's to come."
He also said, "Maybe the best we can do is do what we love as best we can."
— Galway Kinnell

A poem round and perfect as a star.
— Alexander Smith

It is perilous work to thrust your hand in the sun
and pull out a spark of immortal flame to warm the hearts of men. — Joyce Kilmer

Nothing keeps a poet / In his high singing mood /
Like unappeasable hunger / For unattainable food. — Joyce Kilmer

If a nation loses its storytellers, it loses its childhood. — Peter Handke

Poetry is my love, my postmark, my hands, my kitchen, my face. — Anne Sexton

If you can't be funny, be interesting. — Harold Ross, Editor of the New Yorker

Fine photography is literature, and it should be. — Walker Evans

I wanted so much to write that I couldn't write a word. — Walker Evans

If the thing is there, why there it is. — Walker Evans

Bucketfuls of words
to water a tiny idea --
the reader sweats.
— Writer's Haiku

I see myself as someone who drops tiny crumbs of nourishment, in the form of comment and conversation, into the black enormous maw of the world's discontent. I will never fill it up or shut it up; but it seems my duty, not to mention my pleasure, to attempt to do so, however ineptly. See me as Sisyphus, but having a good time. — Fay Weldon

Novelists do not write as birds sing, by the push of nature. It is part of the job that there
should be much routine and some daily stuff on the level of carpentry. — William Golding

The poetry I admire most tries to relate society to solitude, common life to privileged life,
and hope to memory. — Carl Dennis

A little nonsense now and then, is cherished by the wisest men. — Roald Dahl

A person is a fool to become a writer. His only compensation is absolute freedom. — Roald Dahl

There is always a sheet of paper. There is always a pen. There is always a way out. — H. L. Mencken

The most solid advice for a writer is this, I think: Try to learn to breathe deeply, really to taste food when you eat, and when you sleep really to sleep. Try as much as possible to be wholly alive with all your might, and when you laugh, laugh like hell. — William Saroyan

Poetry is truth in its Sunday clothes. — Joseph Roux (1834-1886), French priest, writer. from Meditations of a Parish Priest

Poetry is a way of taking life by the throat. — Robert Frost

Poetry isn’t a profession, it’s a way of life. It’s an empty basket;
you put your life into it and make something out of that. — Mary Oliver

Poetry is concerned with using with abusing, with losing with wanting, with denying with avoiding with adoring with replacing the noun. It is doing that always doing that, doing that and doing nothing but that. Poetry is doing nothing but using losing refusing and pleasing and betraying and caressing nouns. That is what poetry does, that is what poetry has to do no matter what kind of poetry it is. And there are a great many kinds of poetry. — Gertrude Stein

There are a thousand thoughts lying within a man that he does not know
till he takes up a pen to write. — William Makepeace Thackeray

It is one of the paradoxes of American literature that our writers are forever looking back
with love and nostalgia at lives they couldn't wait to leave. — Anatole Broyard

Every writing career starts as a personal quest for sainthood, for self-betterment.
Sooner or later, and as a rule quite soon,
a man discovers that his pen accomplishes a lot more than his soul. — Joseph Brodsky

As a poet I hold the most archaic values on earth . . . the fertility of the soil, the magic of animals, the power-vision in solitude, the terrifying initiation and rebirth, the love and ecstasy of the dance, the common work of the tribe. I try to hold both history and the wilderness in mind,
that my poems may approach the true measure of things
and stand against the unbalance and ignorance of our times. — Gary Snyder