John Ciardi quotes
Modern art is what happens when painters stop looking at girls and persuade themselves that they have a better idea.
Love is the word used to label the sexual excitement of the young, the habituation of the middle-aged, and the mutual dependence of the old.
You don't have to suffer to be a poet; adolescence is enough suffering for anyone.
A university is what a college becomes when the faculty loses interest in the students.
But when the pen is in his hand he has to write by itch and twitch, though certainly his itch and twitch are intimately conditioned by all his past itching and twitching, and by all his past theorizing about them.
Intelligence recognizes what has happened. Genius recognizes what will happen.
It's not a how-to-do-it school but more nearly a confessional in which people who have spent their lives at the writing process itemize their failures while clinging to their hopes.
Nothing goes further toward a man's liberation than the act of surviving his need for character.
Poetry lies its way to the truth.
The day will happen whether or not you get up.
The reader deserves an honest opinion. If he doesn't deserve it, give it to him anyhow.
What has any poet to trust more than the feel of the thing? Theory concerns him only until he picks up his pen, and it begins to concern him again as soon as he lays it down.
Written by a sponge dipped in warm milk and sprinkled with sugar.