Sharon Olds Quotes - Page 2

Well, one thing I'm really interested in, when I'm writing, is being accurate.

If I wrote in a sonnet form, I would be distorting. Or if I had some great new idea for line breaks and I used it in a poem, but it's really not right for that poem, but I wanted it, that would be distorting.

Because a poem is not written while running or while answering the phone. It's written in whatever minutes one has. Sometimes you have half an hour.

I think this is true for all artists. My senses are very important to me.

To me, the mind seems to be spread out in the whole body - the senses are part of the brain. I guess they're not where the thinking is done.

I'm not sure that the benefit - as a writer and as a citizen - that I would get from reading at least the front page of the Times every day or every other day would outweigh the depression.

Many poets write books. They'll tell you: Well, I've got my next book, but there are two poems I need to write, one about x, one about y. This is a wonder to me.

I think that my work is easy to understand because I am not a thinker, I am not a... How can I put it? I write the way I perceive, I guess.

The amount of horror one used to hear about in one village could be quite extreme. But one might not have heard about all the other villages' horrors at the same time.

One of the duties of a baseball fan is to engage in arguments with the man behind him.

Well, 'The Wellspring' was written from 1983 to 1986. And it had a section in the beginning that was poems that began from others' experience.

Every poet I know - although there may be some I don't know who lead very different lives, who maybe live in the country and don't teach - tends to be just like the rest of us: just really busy, really overcommitted.

A family is a mystery.

Their spirits and their visions are embodied in their craft. And so is mine. It's not Jane Saw Puff. But the clarity of Jane Saw Puff is precious to me.

I have heard about the civilized, the marriages run on talk, elegant and honest, rational. But and I are savages.

I have never thought I could take it, not even for the children. It is all I have wanted to do, to stand between them and and pain. But I come from a long line of women who put themselves first.

She'd crack A joke sharp as a tin lid Hot from the teeth of the can-opener, And cackle her crack-corn laugh.

I'm probably so out of it at my age that I don't know what people think.

Who wants to put together something that will bear some relationship to the vision or memory or experience or story or idea or dream or whatever.

Everyone is so different. I sometimes wish I wrote in a different way. You know, that feeling of: So-and-so writes slowly, if only I wrote slowly.

Maybe we can use a metaphor for it, out of dance. I think for many years I was aware of the need, in dance and in life, to breathe deeply and to take in more air than we usually take in.

The teaching is very rewarding, and very time-consuming, and very exhausting. But it's wonderful. The community here at NYU is very precious to me.

At one point I took on a new job, and I just didn't have time to do anything but work.

It might be a bad thing, not to know what's going on in the world. I can't say I really approve of it.

The decision for me was whether to have 'The Father' be a book that told a story - from the point of view of this speaker, the daughter - without, as in the earlier books, then having a section on something else and a section on something else.