17 Quotes by C. K. Williams

I think poetry always lives its life, and people come to it and people go away from it, 'people' in the sense of larger numbers of people. It's as though you begin to think that poetry is a resource, and that at certain times people seem to need it or want it or can find sustenance in it, and at other times they can't.

Sometimes you have a poem that you really want to write and it never happens.

I tended to write poems about both social and spiritual problems, and some problems one doesn't really want to solve, and so the problems themselves are solved. You certainly don't want to solve problems in poems that haven't been solved in the world.

I don't like denial. I don't like repression.

Poems have a different music from ordinary language, and every poem has a different kind of music of necessity, and that’s, in a way, the hardest thing about writing poetry is waiting for that music, and sometimes you never know if it’s going to come.

Maybe shy is when you’re lonely and you don’t think anybody can help you.

I am your own personal verb now.

If you spend your whole life being depressed about life, you're wasting it.