” Poetry is like making a joke. If you get one word wrong at the end of a joke, you’ve lost the whole thing. “
” The kind of writing that matters most to me is something you don’t learn about. It’s constantly coming out of what I don’t know rather than what I do know. “
” In a sense, much that is learned is bound to be bad habits. You’re always beginning again. “
” You have to be rather relentless about pushing other things out of the way. This activity of writing, which has no promises attached to it, comes to be given a kind of arbitrary but persistent importance. “
” He said you should write about 75 lines every day. You know, Pound was a great one for laying down the law about how you did anything. “
” What a great poem teaches you – and it’s not intellectual at all – is the resonance in the language that’s heard there. This goes back to the very origins of poetry and to the very origins of language. “
All 6 W. S. Merwin Quotes about You in picture
Topics: You quotes