Franz Wright

“literature will lose, sunlight will win, don't worry.”

“I am in no way different from anyone else, that my predicament, my sense of aloneness or isolation may be precisely what unites me with everyone.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“It's hard for me to grasp that I might somehow be my father's equal in any way.”

“There are people who recall my father as a saint and a monster. I'm quite sure I will share the same fate.”

“And let me ask you this: the dead, where aren't they?”

“What I myself experience is indescribable gratitude in the face of God's perpetual and preemptive love, a love which is not contingent upon requital or even belief in His existence.”

“I wish my father could be around.”

“I used to comfort myself with the idea of a book with serrated, detachable pages, so that you could read the thing the way it came and then shuffle the pages, like a giant deck of cards, and read the book in an entirely different order. It would be a different book, wouldn't it? It would be one of infinite books.”

“This is no occupation for an adult who can look other adults in the eye, carry his own weight, and count himself one of them.”

“I basked in you;I loved you, helplessly, with a boundless tongue-tied love.And death doesn't prevent me from loving you.Besides, in my opinion you aren't dead.(I know dead people, and you are not dead.)”

“For about twenty years, if I managed to write ten or twelve poems in a year; I considered that a pretty successful year, but I wrote 'The Beforelife' within a year.”

“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.'”

“The poetic prose that most interests me is that of Henri Michaux.”

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

“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.”

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

“I write and have done so primarily for personal pleasure.”