Quotes from Miller Williams

I always have pen and paper with me.

For something to be useful to the spirit is not very valuable to get your covered wagon across the desert. We have adopted that attitude so thoroughly that any American father whose son tells him he wants to write poetry will be embarrassed.

I respond to mood. I hear some phrase, or pick up a rhythm.

I don't like poetry that doesn't give me a sense of ritual, but I don't like poetry that doesn't sound like people talking to each other. I try to do both at once.

Ritual is important to us as human beings. It ties us to our traditions and our histories.

Jazz is very important. It's not something I can put my finger on. When I'm writing at my favorite time, I like to have the gentle side of Coltrane or Brubeck on the CD player. It creates sort of a spiritual space in which I write best.

I put myself in a spiritual and physical place where I've learned from experience the synapses are likely to fire and the juices are likely to flow, and simply begin to write.

A thing may fail as a poem because it tries to do what a poem cannot do: it tries to become a treatise on cosmic truth... We can best be exact about the cosmic things - God and truth, beauty, eternity and love - by not talking directly about them.

I like to think that the best poetry is or involves a contest between ordinary conversation and ritual.

I manage a toast to the Christmas treeand one to the sweet absurdityin the miracle of the verb to be.Lucky you, lucky me.

Have compassion for everyone you meet, even if they don't want it. What seems conceit, bad manners, or cynicism is always a sign of things no ears have heard, no eyes have seen. You do not know what wars are going on down there where the spirit meets the bone.

Every word you add dilutes the sentence.

I manage a toast to the Christmas tree and one to the sweet absurdity in the miracle of the verb to be. Lucky you, lucky me.

Wherever it left us, we were barely learning to live with it when here came Flannery O'Connor and Hank Williams to tell us that no one has ever been loved the way everybody wants to be loved, and that's hard. That's hard. --last stanza of How Step by Step We Have Come to Understand

He lives all alone now, in the home they bought, and finally seems to be managing, more or less. Not the way he was, of course, with her, who lives alone now, too, at the same address. - Separatio in Loco

Time goes too fast. Come home.

The day you took the test I would have told you this: that you had no time to listen to questions hunting out the answers in your files is surely the kind of irony that poems are made of

Have compassion for everyone you meet, even when they don't want it. What seems conceit, bad manners, or cynicism is always a sign of things no ears have heard, no eyes have seen. You do not know what wars are going on down there where the spirit meets the bone.

We have memorized America, how it was born and who we have been and where. In ceremonies and silence we say the words, telling the stories, singing the old songs. We like the places they take us. Mostly we do.