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Poetry comes to me out of thin air or out of my unconscious mind. It's sort of the way dreams come to us and the way that we get knowledge from them, through television, old movies, which I watch a lot of. Lines of dialogue suddenly seem to be part of a poem.

John Ashbery

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John Ashbery
Age: 90 †
Born: 1927
Born: July 28
Died: 2017
Died: September 3
Journalist
Poet
University Teacher
Writer
Rochester
New York
G'on Ashberi
John Ashberry
Jonas Barry
Jon Asshuberī
John Lawrence Ashbery
John Ashbery
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More quotes by John Ashbery

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The sun fades like the spreading Of a peacock's tail, as though twilight Might be read as a warning to those desperate For easy solutions.
John Ashbery
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The summer demands and takes away too much. /But night, the reserved, the reticent, gives more than it takes
John Ashbery
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Life is beautiful. He who reads that As in the window of some distant, speeding train Knows what he wants, and what will befall.
John Ashbery
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The poem is sad because it wants to be yours, and cannot be.
John Ashbery
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Part of the strength of Pollock and Rothko's art, in fact, is this doubt as to whether art may be there at all.
John Ashbery
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There is the view that poetry should improve your life. I think people confuse it with the Salvation Army.
John Ashbery
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We are prisoners of the world's demented sink. The soft enchantments of our years of innocence Are harvested by accredited experience Our fondest memories soon turn to poison And only oblivion remains in season.
John Ashbery
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Its a bit mad. Too bad, I mean, that getting to know each just for a fleeting second Must be replaced by unperfect knowledge of the featureless whole Like some pocket history of the world, so general As to constitute a sob or wail
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It is written in the Book of Usable Minutes That all things have their center in their dying.
John Ashbery
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The gray glaze of the past attacks all know-how...
John Ashbery
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What is the past, what is it all for? A mental sandwich?
John Ashbery
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Expecting rain, the profile of a day Wears its soul like a hat.
John Ashbery
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Where then shall hope and fear their objects find?
John Ashbery
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And we may be led, then, upward through more Powerful forms of poetry, past columns With peeling posters on them, to the country of indifference. Meanwhile if the swell diapasons, blooms Unhappily and too soon, the little people are nonetheless real.
John Ashbery
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In the increasingly convincing darkness The words become palpable, like a fruit That is too beautiful to eat.
John Ashbery
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Reading is a pleasure, but to finish reading, to come to the blank space at the end, is also a pleasure.
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Until, accustomed to disappointments, you can let yourself rule and be ruled by these strings or emanations that connect everything together, you haven't fully exorcised the demon of doubt that sets you in motion like a rocking horse that cannot stop rocking.
John Ashbery
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I like poems you can tack all over with a hammer and there are no hollow places.
John Ashbery
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Therefore bivouac we On this great, blond highway, unimpeded by Veiled scruples, worn conundrums. Morning is Impermanent. Grab sex things, swing up Over the horizon like a boy On a fishing expedition.
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I tried each thing, only some were immortal and free.
John Ashbery