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"Because language is the carrier of ideas, it is easy to believe that it should be very little else than such a carrier."
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"For me poetry is an evasion of the real job of writing prose."

"A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness."

"At eight, he had once told his mother that he wanted to paint air."

"I have spent a good many years since-too many, I think-being ashamed about what I write. I think I was forty before I realized that almost every writer of fiction or poetry who has ever published a line has been accused by someone of wasting his or her God-given talent. If you write (or paint or dance or sculpt or sing, I suppose), someone will try to make you feel lousy about it, that's all."

"He kept seeing the brains dribbling down the wallpaper. It wasn't the killing that stayed on his mind, it was the spilled talent. A lifetime of honing and shaping torn apart in less than a second. All those stories, all those images, and what came out looked like so much oatmeal. What was the point?"

"When you aren't satisfied with what has already been done, make something better. That is the greatest responsibility and the true freedom of creativity. The freedom is in that it doesn't need to complain."

"Fresh, solid ideas feel like gifts to writers, therefore every morning is Christmas."

"We write to shed our sorrows and give strength to our spirit."

"My pen beats faster as I write with my heart."

"But without a reader, a story is only half complete. It's like blueprints that never get built; like a swimming pool without water. The foundation's there, but it's useless. Without a reader, the words just sit on the page, waiting to come alive in someone's imagination."
Explore more quotes by Louise Bogan


"The intellectual is a middle-class product; if he is not born into the class he must soon insert himself into it, in order to exist. He is the fine nervous flower of the bourgeoisie."


"Innocence of heart and violence of feeling are necessary in any kind of superior achievement: The arts cannot exist without them."


"No more pronouncements on lousy verse. No more hidden competition. No more struggling not to be a square."


"Because language is the carrier of ideas, it is easy to believe that it should be very little else than such a carrier."
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