Quote

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.

Sharon Olds

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Sharon Olds
Age: 54
Climate Activist
Feminist
Poet
Writer
San Francisco County
California
Writing
Next
Two
Poems
Wells
Poets
Book
Poet
Well
Wonder
Need
Books
Many
Write
Needs
Tell

More quotes by Sharon Olds

Image
Baseball is reassuring. It makes me feel as if the world is not going to blow up.
Sharon Olds
Image
Maybe in order to understand sex fully/one has to risk being destroyed by it.
Sharon Olds
Image
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.
Sharon Olds
Image
My poems - I don't even like the sound of that, in a way. Not that anyone else wrote them. But we know that only people who are really close to us care about our personal experience.
Sharon Olds
Image
A family is a mystery.
Sharon Olds
Image
I did not deceive him, he did not deceive me, I did not leave him, he did not leave me, I freed him, he freed me.
Sharon Olds
Image
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.
Sharon Olds
Image
Poets are like steam valves, where the ordinary feelings of ordinary people can escape and be shown.
Sharon Olds
Image
I'm not asking a poem to carry a lot of rocks in its pockets. Just being an ordinary observer and liver and feeler and letting the experience get through you onto the notebook with the pen, through the arm, out of the body, onto the page, without distortion.
Sharon Olds
Image
I did not know him, I knew my idea of him.
Sharon Olds
Image
Take your vitamins. Exercise. Just work to love yourself as much as you can - not more than the people around you but not so much less.
Sharon Olds
Image
Once you lose someone it is never exactly the same person who comes back.
Sharon Olds
Image
When I quit all these things and said I didn't have any time, I meant I didn't have any time.
Sharon Olds
Image
Poems come from ordinary experiences and objects, I think. Out of memory - a dress I lent my daughter on her way back to college a newspaper photograph of war a breast self-exam the tooth fairy Calvinist parents who beat up their children a gesture of love seeing oneself naked over age 50 in a set of bright hotel bathroom mirrors.
Sharon Olds
Image
I wish I wrote more about the world at more distance from myself.
Sharon Olds
Image
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.
Sharon Olds
Image
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.
Sharon Olds
Image
.. to a poet, the human community is like the community of birds to a bird, singing to each other. Love is one of the reasons we are singing to one another, love of language itself, love of sound, love of singing itself, and love of the other birds.
Sharon Olds
Image
I think this is true for all artists. My senses are very important to me.
Sharon Olds
Image
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.
Sharon Olds