Quote

But, the best times I have found, in my life, are late at night or early in the morning and I think it's because you're outside the social realm.

Edward Hirsch

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Edward Hirsch
Age: 74
Born: 1950
Born: January 20
Poet
Chicago
Illinois
Times
Social
Found
Realm
Night
Realms
Best
Early
Think
Outside
Thinking
Late
Life
Morning

More quotes by Edward Hirsch

Image
There's the brilliant audacity of youth that poets strike upon in their earliest work sometimes that they never can hit upon again.
Edward Hirsch
Image
It does demand a certain space in order to read it and I think that space is somewhat threatened by the lack of attention that people have and the amount of time that they give to things.
Edward Hirsch
Image
There's always some place to go. You don't need workshops, you don't need friends necessarily, you can be befriended by literature itself.
Edward Hirsch
Image
In American tradition a certain kind of, I would say, desperate American friendliness in which the poet tries to reach out through the page to make a connection by the side of the road with some other person.
Edward Hirsch
Image
Cafeteria-style education, combined with the unwillingness of our schools to place demands on students, has resulted in a steady diminishment of commonly shared information between generations and between young people themselves.
Edward Hirsch
Image
I think fiction goes to poetry for the intensity of its use of language.
Edward Hirsch
Image
The mysterious thing about writing poetry is that when you're - when things are going poorly, when you're not thinking well, even making two sentences together is extremely hard and I just can't make the connections.
Edward Hirsch
Image
I was once doing a question and answer period with the novelist Jane Smiley in a bookstore and someone asked us what our processes were and Jane said hers and then I said mine and Jane said, Well, if I had a student like that I'd force him never to write like that again because you could never write a novel in the way that you write poetry.
Edward Hirsch
Image
A certain kind of poetry looks back at experience from an older perspective.
Edward Hirsch
Image
It's not important - it's not necessary that you read everything. What is necessary is that you care about things that you read and that you find something that really matters to you and you try and make something like that.
Edward Hirsch
Image
I think the deepest thing is that many fiction writers tell stories but are not elegant writers. But, we're not writing journalism when we're making literature.
Edward Hirsch
Image
I did not know the work of mourning Is a labor in the dark We carry inside ourselves
Edward Hirsch
Image
One, something emotional has to be at stake. There has to be something important for me that I'm writing about. And then two, I have to have a formal idea. Something has to be being worked out in poetry.
Edward Hirsch
Image
I have the idea that lyric poetry is a poetry that's driven by a sense of the presence of death. That there's something unbearable about the fact that we're going to die and that we can't stand it and I think you find that out in childhood and you don't really - at least I found it out in childhood and I found it hard to get over.
Edward Hirsch
Image
The poets needed to learn to pay greater attention to character and to narrative.
Edward Hirsch
Image
The imagination is an organ of understanding. And the imagination needs all the faculties at hand, all the sensibility, all the conscious and unconscious intelligence it can galvanize to fulfill its luminous mission.
Edward Hirsch
Image
I mean, in the history of poetry there have been a lot poetries where you have to inherit the position of poet from your ancestors and I think that if you just leave anyone to become a poet based on an aristocratic society, then a lot of people are left out who might have something to offer.
Edward Hirsch
Image
Books and newspapers assume a common reader that is, a person who knows the things known by other literate persons in the culture. Obviously, such assumptions are never identical from writer to writer, but they show a remarkable consistency
Edward Hirsch
Image
There's never been a culture without poetry in the history of the world. In every culture, in every language there is expressive play, expressive word play, there's language use to different purposes that we would call poetry.
Edward Hirsch
Image
So, it's a continual process of trial and error and then I find things and I throw it out and start again, but I keep writing it over again.
Edward Hirsch