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"When you finish a poem, it clicks shut like the top of a jewel box, but prose is endless. I haven't experienced an awful lot of clicking shut!"
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Exlpore more Writing quotes
"It just happens to be the way that I'm made. I have to write things down to feel I fully comprehend them."
"A writer's primary goal is to make sense. The bookstore's is to make cents."
"Remember Stephen King's First Rule of Writers and Agents, learned by bitter personal experience: You don't need one until you're making enough for someone to steal ... and if you're making that much, you'll be able to take your pick of good agents."
"Write out of love. Your piece will finish itself."
"At the inauguration of each sentence, the writer commences with an optimistic sense of curiosity. Similar to an inquisitive explorer, a writer begins each thoughtful decree with an appreciative sense of the unknown and ends with a reverent regard for the unanswerable. Repeating this instigating act of discovery by placing a combination of sentences down on paper creates a unique verdict. The writer's compilation of pronouncements expresses their interpretation of life. Replicating this creative endeavor in the futile effort to say it all imitates the revolving mystery of life where physical reality and mysterious forces of nature operate upon humankind."
"One of the really bad things you can do to your writing is to dress up the vocabulary, looking for long words because you're maybe a little bit ashamed of your short ones. This is like dressing up a household pet in evening clothes. The pet is embarrassed and the person who committed this act of premeditated cuteness should be even more embarrassed."
"An author's operating charter is to unearth embedded symbols that reflect complementary and inconsistent relationships of our collective assemblage, combine harmonizing and contradictory conceptions that motivate us, and delve larger truths out of variable and erratic elements of human nature."
Explore more quotes by Kenneth Koch
"The subject matter of the stories on the surface... there seem to be a number of stories about travel."
"I was influenced by surrealist poetry and painting as were thousands of other people, and it seems to me to have become a part of the way I write, but it's not."
"Once I start writing about something, it goes off rather fast, and sometimes details which might be interesting such as what the room looked like or what somebody said that was not exactly on the same subject tend to get lost."
"It's a well known thing that ordinary perceptions can have a strange aspect when one is travelling."
"I've had trouble with criticism, I guess. It's hard to know what role criticism plays in either encouraging poets or in getting other people to read them."
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