38 Quotes by Franz Wright

Poetry endures when it possesses passionate and primally sincere clarity in the service of articulating universal human concerns.

We know there are poets who are chosen: by what or whom, we no more know than what lies beyond our final breath, or what caused a certain action which resulted in the fulfillment or the desecration and collapse of what we most cared for in life.

When I was nine, I started reading Homer. I would get up at four o'clock in the morning, before I had to go to school, in third or fourth grade, and, for several hours, I would read 'The Iliad' or 'The Odyssey.'

When I'm in certain moods, a conversation will start up in my head, and suddenly I'll realize that the language has reached a very high and interesting level, and then lines and stanzas will just kind of appear, full-blown.

Poetry, just because it is poetry, doesn't mean it is some kind of magic spell.

Beckett's 'Stories and Texts for Nothing' is probably my favorite book.

I write and have done so primarily for personal pleasure.

I've always envied people who compose music or paint, because they don't have to be bothered with the sort of crude mess that language normally is, in everyday life and in the way we use it.

Its hard for me to grasp that I might somehow be my fathers equal in any way.