Figure out who you are.
We are told that when Hölderlin went 'mad,' he constantly repeated, 'Nothing is happening to me, nothing is happening to me. '
Only truthful hands write true poems. I cannot see any basic difference between a handshake and a poem.
Only one thing remained reachable, close and secure amid all losses: language. Yes, language. In spite of everything, it remained secure against loss.
A poem, being an instance of language, hence essentially dialogue, may be a letter in a bottle thrown out to the sea with the-surely not always strong-hope that it may somehow wash up somewhere, perhaps on the shoreline of the heart. In this way, too, poems are en route: they are headed towards. Toward what? Toward something open, inhabitable, an approachable you, perhaps, an approachable reality. Such realities are, I think, at stake in a poem.
Reality is not simply there, it does not simply exist: it must be sought out and won.
German poetry is going in a very different direction from French poetry. . . . Its language has become more sober, more factual. It distrusts "beauty. " It tries to be truthful.
The hardest thing about being famous is that people are always nice to you.
My wife and I both made a list of 5 people we could sleep with. . . she read hers out and there were no surprises. . . 1 George Clooney. . . 2 Brad Pitt etc. . . I thought 'Ive got the better deal here'. . . 1 Your sister
I've always viewed my career with some suspicion, like I don't want to count on it to be the only thing I do. Partly that has to do with feeling like an imposter, like we all do sometimes, and partly I like doing other things, and being a full-time artist takes a focus I recognise I don't have.
Our children learn the phonetic method, which is why they're very good spellers, I suppose. Because rather than ABC or just saying a word, they'll have to go a as in apple and all the other a's there are in the English language. They learn that when they're four. Children all over America can tell you that a, e, i, o, u, and sometimes y are vowels. But you ask them about that "sometimes y," and they can't tell you.