81 Quotes by John Ciardi

But when the pen is in his hand he has to write by itch and twitch, though certainly his itch and twitch are intimately conditioned by all his past itching and twitching, and by all his past theorizing about them.

A university is what a college becomes when the faculty loses interest in students.

Bah! You asked for it. This is your life. The price is right enough. You've got no secrets. People are . . . well, never mind. But tell me, boys and girls and Federal gentlemen, has anyone had time to think of Khrushchev lately?

It's not a how-to-do-it school but more nearly a confessional in which people who have spent their lives at the writing process itemize their failures while clinging to their hopes.

A university is a reading and discussion club. If students knew how to use the library, they wouldn't need the rest of the buildings. The faculty's job, in great part, is to teach students how to use a library in a living way. All a student should really need is access to the library and a place to sleep.

Boys are the cash of war.

The success of the poem is determined not by how much the poet felt in writing it, but by how much the reader feels in reading it.

Spontaneous is what you get after the seventeenth draft.

The thing about cats as you might find, is that no one knows what they have in mind.