Quotes About Struggle

I don't write poetry when I wish, I write when I can't, when my larynx is flooded and my throat is shut.

A play's got to be a dramatic event, not a lyrical event. It's not music, it's not poetry, it's not dance, it's not narrative - it's dramaticit's about conflict. It's about forces coming together.

Poetry is not a waiting room where one stays overnight...every word is war.

I guess the quality that makes one write poetry keeps one from selling it.

The works have to look like they're confident. But they also have to look sort of troubled. It's this weird thing: "Does that look confident and troubled?" It's a bit like difficult poetry.

My verse has brought me no roubles to spare: no craftsmen have made mahogany chairs for my house.

I don't want to go on being a root in the dark, vacillating, stretched out, shivering with sleep, downward, in the soaked guts of the earth, absorbing and thinking, eating each day.

Romantic poetry had its heyday when people like Lord Byron were kicking it large. But you try and make a living as a poet today, and you'll find it's very different!

I sang in my chains like the sea

Before verse can be human again it must learn to be brutal.

Being in prison for seven years was like being in an army that never drilled, never deployed, and only fought itself.

To have ruined one's self over poetry is an honour

Poetry has never brought me in enough money to buy shoestrings.

I wanted to be a composer for a while, and for a while, and maybe still, I found writing music much easier than writing poetry. So maybe my brain clings to it.

When I first started to write poetry, I used to feel as if my tongue would go numb.

In poetry everything which must be said is almost impossible to say well.

During the last years of Mayakovski's life, when all poetry had ceased to exist . . . literature had stopped.

Then one can't make a living out of poetry? Certainly not. What fool expects to? Out of rhyming, yes.

Reality, the oppressor's tongue.

The second was some rather bad poetry, but it was short, and I forced my way through by gritting my teeth and occasionally closing one eye so as not to damage the entirety of my brain.

A person born with an instinct for poverty.

the impossibility of being humanall too humanthis breathingin and outout and inthese punksthese cowardsthese championsthese mad dogs of glorymoving this little bit of light towardusimpossibly.

A wounded dear leaps the highest

Yet do I marvel at this curious thing: To make a poet black, and bid him sing.