Paul Engle Quotes

Human Life Is Too Difficult For People.

I Wanted To Write Poetry Almost A Little More Than I Wanted To Eat.

Has The Painter Not Always Gone To An Art School, Or At Least To An Established Master, For Instruction? And The Composer, The Sculptor, The Architect? Then Why Not The Writer? Good Poets, Like Good Hybrid Corn, Are Both Born And Made.

Every Christmas Should Begin With The Sound Of Bells, And When I Was A Child Mine Always Did. But They Were Sleigh Bells, Not Church Bells, For We Lived In A Part Of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, Where There Were No Churches.

Contrary To Slanderous Eastern Opinion, Much Of Iowa Is Not Flat, But Rolling Hills Country With A Lot Of Timber, A Handsome And Imaginative Landscape, Crowded With Constant Small Changes Of Scene And Full Of Little Creeks Winding With Pools Where Shiners, Crappies And Catfish Hover.

The Years Rolled Their Brutal Course Down The Hill Of Time. Still Poor, My Clothes Still Smelling Of The Horse Barn, Still Writing Those Doubtful Poems Where Too Much Emotion Clashed With Too Many Words.

Writing Is Like This -- You Dredge For The Poem's Meaning The Way Police Dredge For A Body. They Think It Is Down There Under The Black Water, They Work The Grappling Hooks Back And Forth.

Verse Is Not Written, It Is Bled; Out Of The Poet's Abstract Head. Words Drip The Poem On The Page; Out Of His Grief, Delight And Rage.

To Eat In The Same Room Where Food Is Cooked - That Is The Way To Thank The Lord For His Abundance.

There Must Be An Alternative Between Hollywood And New York, Between Those Two Places Psychically As Well As Geographically. The University Of Iowa Tries To Offer Such A Community, Congenial To The Young Writer, With His Uneasiness About Writing As An Honorable Career, Or With His Excess Of Ego About Calling Himself A Writer.

Touch Was Important. The Evening Of The Third Of July We Would Go Around The Neighborhood And Look At The Fireworks Others Had Bought, Taking Them Out Of The Brown Paper Sack And Handling Them Cautiously As If They Were Precious Stones. There Was Envy When We Saw Sacks With More In Them Than We Had.

When Your First Marriage Goes Into Tragedy, You Become Very Battle-scarred... I Even Thought Of Suicide. Luckily, I Had Known Some Happy Marriages.