31 Quotes by Ian Hamilton Finlay

People have always found me challenging - I don't know why, when I am only being myself. I don't understand why they find me so annoying but they do. It is pity, but that is how it is.

However, I don't feel the world is looking over my shoulder when I am working - I never think about this at all. What I think about is trying to make my work pure, and if it is pure then it can be accessible. It is quite straight forward really.

I am always a beginner. I only try to include different parts of life; the pastoral, the tragic, et cetera.

For me concrete poetry was a particular way of using language which came out of a particular feeling, and I don't have control over whether this feeling is in me or not.

I have often said that just as the French revolution, for instance, understood itself through antiquity, I think our time can be understood through the French revolution. It is quite a natural process to use other times to understand your own time.

But I can only write what the muse allows me to write. I cannot choose, I can only do what I am given, and I feel pleased when I feel close to concrete poetry - still.

The same sort of thing happened in my dispute with the National Trust book: Follies: A National Trust Guide, which implied that the only pleasure you can get from Folly architecture is by calling the architect mad, and by laughing at the architecture.

As a friendly one. I would still like to write concrete poems, but I can only do it sometimes.

I am not a modern man, I am just a wee old fashioned one.