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"If I wrote in a sonnet form, I would be distorting. Or if I had some great new idea for line breaks and I used it in a poem, but it's really not right for that poem, but I wanted it, that would be distorting."
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"The future is created by those who have a great imagination and the will to make it a reality by their actions."

"The design of a book is the pattern of a reality controlled and shaped by the mind of a writer."

"If I had waited long enough I probably never would have written anything at all since there is a tendency when you really begin to learn something about a thing not to want to write about it but rather to keep on learning about it always and at no time, unless you are very egotistical, which, of course, accounts for many books, will you be able to say: now I know all about this and will write about it."

"Skill gives you legs to jog, talent gives you legs to run, brilliance gives you legs to sprint, but genius gives you wings to fly."

"For you to make your creative work creative, you must seek creativity from the creator."

"Imagination is a glorious wonder."

"Writing the same kind of material is no guarantee you'll be working from the same ethos so that writers from different fields are just as likely to have an understanding of each other's work as someone working in the same genre."

"Every time a man puts a new idea across he finds ten men who thought of it before he did - but they only thought of it."

"I want to paint the rest of my days with the best colors."

"It does not need to be perfect - or technically correct - to be magic."
Explore more quotes by Sharon Olds


"Well, "The Wellspring" was written from 1983 to 1986. And it had a section in the beginning that was poems that began from others' experience."


"Maybe we can use a metaphor for it, out of dance. I think for many years I was aware of the need, in dance and in life, to breathe deeply and to take in more air than we usually take in."


"The amount of horror one used to hear about in one village could be quite extreme. But one might not have heard about all the other villages' horrors at the same time."


"Many poets write books. They'll tell you: Well, I've got my next book, but there are two poems I need to write, one about x, one about y. This is a wonder to me."


"The decision for me was whether to have "The Father" be a book that told a story - from the point of view of this speaker, the daughter - without, as in the earlier books, then having a section on something else and a section on something else."
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