William Carlos Williams Quotes about Writing

The better work men do is always done under stress and at great personal cost.

The better work men do is always done under stress and at great personal cost.

William Carlos Williams

Business, Stress, Writing

William Carlos Williams (1991). “The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams”, p.188, New Directions Publishing

I think all writing is a disease. You can't stop it.

William Carlos Williams

Writing, Thinking, Disease

Quoted in Newsweek, 7 Jan 1957.

Writing is not a searching about in the daily experience for apt similes and pretty thoughts and images… It is not a conscious recording of the day’s experiences ‘freshly and with the appearance of reality’… The writer of imagination would find himself released from observing things for the purpose of writing them down later. He would be there to enjoy, to taste, to engage the free world, not a world which he carries like a bag of food, always fearful lest he drop something or someone get more than he.

William Carlos Williams

Writing, Reality, Imagination

The only human value of anything, writing included, is intense vision of the facts.

William Carlos Williams

Writing, Vision, Facts

William Carlos Williams, A. Walton Litz, Christopher John MacGowan (1986). “The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams: 1909-1939”, p.312, New Directions Publishing

I have never been one to write by rule, not even by my own rules.

William Carlos Williams

Writing, My Own

1954 Letter to Richard Eberhart, 23 May.

Poets are being pursued by the philosophers today, out of the poverty of philosophy. God damn it, you might think a man had no business to be writing, to be a poet unless some philosophic stinker gave him permission.

William Carlos Williams

Philosophy, Writing, Men

William Carlos Williams, John C. Thirlwall (1957). “The Selected Letters of William Carlos Williams”, p.219, New Directions Publishing

Let the snake wait under his weed and the writing be of words, slow and quick, sharp to strike, quiet to wait, sleepless. - through metaphor to reconcile the people and the stones. Compose. (No ideas but in things) Invent! Saxifrage is my flower that splits the rocks.

William Carlos Williams

Weed, Flower, Writing

William Carlos Williams (1991). “The Collected Poems of Williams Carlos Williams: 1939-1962”, p.455, New Directions Publishing

I'll write whatever I damn please, whenever I damn please and as I damn please and it'll be good if the authentic spirit of change is on it.

William Carlos Williams

Writing, Spirit, Damn

William Carlos Williams (1971). “Imaginations”, p.13, New Directions Publishing

Why do I write today? The beauty of the terrible faces of our nonentities stirs me to it: colored women day workers- old and experienced- returning home at dusk, in cast off clothing faces like old Florentine oak.

William Carlos Williams

Home, Writing, Faces

William Carlos Williams (1991). “The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams”, p.70, New Directions Publishing

But the thing that stands eternally in the way of really good writing is always one: the virtual impossibility of lifting to the imagination those things which lie under the direct scrutiny of the senses, close to the nose. It is this difficulty that sets a value upon all works of art and makes them a necessity. The senses witnessing what is immediately before them in detail see a finality which they cling to in despair, not knowing which way to turn. Thus this so-called natural or scientific array becomes fixed, the walking devil of modern life.

William Carlos Williams

Art, Lying, Writing

William Carlos Williams (1920). “Kora in Hell: Improvisations”

Afraid lest he be caught up in a net of words, tripped up, bewildered and so defeated-thrown aside-a man hesitates to write down his innermost convictions.

William Carlos Williams

Writing, Men, Defeated

William Carlos Williams, Ron Loewinsohn (1974). “The Embodiment of Knowledge”, p.104, New Directions Publishing

The War is the first and only thing in the world today. The arts generally are not, nor is this writing a diversion from that for relief, a turning away. It is the war or part of it, merely a different sector of the field.

William Carlos Williams

Art, War, Writing

William Carlos Williams, A. Walton Litz, Christopher MacGowan (1991). “The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams: 1939-1962”, p.53, New Directions Publishing

William Carlos Williams Quotes about Writing

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