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"As a friendly one. I would still like to write concrete poems, but I can only do it sometimes."
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"I was very committed to the process of composing, working at poems, putting things together and taking them apart like some kind of experimental filmmaker."
"Why does one always ask a writer why they stopped? I am sure everyone finds in any drawer a few dear poems."
"By reason of weird translation, many such sets of instructions read like poems anyhow."
"I consider my films to be poems that are all as personal as my writing and as hand-made."
"I also write poems, so that is something that I really enjoy."
"I tend to like poems that engage me - that is to say, which do not bore me."
"I was writing notes, but not composing poems. The Hunter began to develop out of this fragmented process."
Explore more quotes by Ian Hamilton Finlay
"The same sort of thing happened in my dispute with the National Trust book: Follies: A National Trust Guide, which implied that the only pleasure you can get from Folly architecture is by calling the architect mad, and by laughing at the architecture."
"I have often said that just as the French revolution, for instance, understood itself through antiquity, I think our time can be understood through the French revolution. It is quite a natural process to use other times to understand your own time."
"No, I don't make my work in order to challenge or confuse other people's expectations - I only do what I find natural."
"For me concrete poetry was a particular way of using language which came out of a particular feeling, and I don't have control over whether this feeling is in me or not."
"If the work is pure then you have to think it could be understood. If it is not understood it doesn't mean that your work is not accessible. It doesn't worry me, but, of course, I would be pleased if people liked my work."
"I am always a beginner. I only try to include different parts of life; the pastoral, the tragic, et cetera."
"People have always found me challenging - I don't know why, when I am only being myself. I don't understand why they find me so annoying but they do. It is pity, but that is how it is."
"What you compose with is neither here nor there, you compose with words, or you compose with stone plants and trees, or you compose with events; the Sheriff's officer, or whatever."
"However, I don't feel the world is looking over my shoulder when I am working - I never think about this at all. What I think about is trying to make my work pure, and if it is pure then it can be accessible. It is quite straight forward really."
"My position is that since the non-secular status of my garden is not recognised by the law; by the world of the public, then the garden can only be private. So, I closed the garden to the public."
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