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"Their spirits and their visions are embodied in their craft. And so is mine. It's not Jane Saw Puff. But the clarity of Jane Saw Puff is precious to me."
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"What can you do to ensure that your voice value translates into impression value?"

"Art is a distinct form of human communication. Art interprets experience, sensation, and feelings. An artistic work translates our mental images and allows other people to understand what we feel; art conveys our happiness, sadness, hopes, doubts, anxieties, fears, desires, and ineffable longings."

"Heaven resonates when one sings wholeheartedly."

"You won't write, won't ya??I just focus on the negative!"

"There are things known-things experienced, felt, and understood-that words hold no power to convey. Attempting to do so only dilutes their substance and does them injustice."

"If something inside of you is real, we will probably find it interesting, and it will probably be universal. So you must risk placing real emotion at the center of your work. Write straight into the emotional center of things. Write toward vulnerability. Risk being unliked. Tell the truth as you understand it. If you're a writer you have a moral obligation to do this. And it is a revolutionary act-truth is always subversive."

"In a man's letters his soul lies naked."

"Life is a sacred story."

"Music is much like fucking, but some composers can't climax and others climax too often, leaving themselves and the listener jaded and spent."
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."


"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."


"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."


"I'm not sure that the benefit - as a writer and as a citizen - that I would get from reading at least the front page of the Times every day or every other day would outweigh the depression."


"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."
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