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"I had no idea where these kids at a small private college in the San Fernando Valley were coming from, why they were coming to hear me, or what they needed to know."
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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."
"How to Be a Poet (to remind myself)
Make a place to sit down. Sit down. Be quiet. You must depend upon affection, reading, knowledge, and skill—more of each than you have—inspiration, work, growing older, patience, for patience joins time to eternity.
Breathe with unconditional breath the unconditioned air. Shun electric wire. Communicate slowly. Live a three-dimensional life; stay away from screens. Stay away from anything that obscures the place it is in.
There are no unsacred places; there are only sacred places and desecrated places. Accept what comes from silence. Make the best you can of it. Of the little words that come out of the silence, like prayers prayed back to the one who prays, make a poem that does not disturb the silence from which it came."
Explore more quotes by David Antin
"I'm standing up thinking. Anybody who wants to listen is welcome. If not, I'm happy to see them go."
"There is probably no oral society that fails to mark the spatial distinction of left and right, peculiar as this distinction may be."
"When you grow up in a family of languages, you develop a kind of casual fluency, so that languages, though differently colored, all seem transparent to experience."
"I didn't think about whether I was writing poems. I was thinking. And the more I was thinking, the more there was I didn't understand."
"I was trying to find out what it was that everybody else understood without giving up my stubborn and hard-won lack of understanding."
"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."
"It's hard being a hostage in somebody else's mouth - or a character in somebody else's novel."
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