A Quote by James Fenton

I've not been a prolific poet, and it always seemed to me to be a bad idea to feel that you had to produce in order to get... credits. Production of a collection of poems every three years or every five years, or whatever, looks good, on paper. But it might not be good; it might be writing on a kind of automatic pilot.
It's a big thing to call yourself a poet. All I can say is that I have always written poems. I don't think I'm interested in any discussion about whether I'm a good poet, a bad poet or a great poet. But I am sure, I want to write great poems. I think every poet should want that.
I gave three years of my life to take care of my dying mother who had Alzheimer's disease. Being there for her every need for three years might have looked codependent but it wasn't because it was what I wanted to do.
Whatever I have been able to achieve in all these years is good for me and I feel God has been kind to me. Having said that I have been part of the limelight all these years but my fans and viewers don't know my real side. With 'Bigg Boss' they will get to know who Shefali Zariwala actually is.
It was the cholesterol. I had two fried eggs a day for breakfast. I had no checkups for five years. I kept meaning to go. The doctor would probably say it was years of bad living. I've always had a good time. Maybe I've had too good a time.
What if all I'd ever known was how it had been for the past three years - me being an unwanted outsider in my own family? I might have turned out like Aphrodite, and I might still be letting my parents control me because I was hoping desperately that I would be good enough, make them proud, so that some day they would really love me.
I've had two great years, probably five good years. So I had 20 years of just kind of uncertainty and suffering and ego destruction and poverty. All these things. There's no way I'm ever going to catch up to the misery years. It's impossible... If I don't do anything dumb or I don't get a disease or something, and then I've got to five to eight years I think where it'll really be great and then it will start to degenerate like uranium, you know?
You do an awful lot of bad writing in order to do any good writing. Incredibly bad. I think it would be very interesting to make a collection of some of the worst writing by good writers.
People send me fanmail in the post, and I keep every letter, and I always say I will read every single one. It might take me years and years, but I'll do it. Your audience are what makes you, so you have give as much back as you can.
I've had, what, two years? Probably five good years. Before that I had twenty years of uncertainty and suffering and ego destruction and poverty. All those things. That'll always outweigh the good times.
I've always been very honest about what's good and bad in my writing. That honesty might have made me sound arrogant sometimes, when I was talking about work I thought was good.
You have good games, you have bad games. You have good years, you have bad years. I have always been kind of philosophical about that.
All of human history is about the going from sudden fat years to the sudden lean years. We've always had good times and bad, and we've had ways of managing the bad times. We have ways of insulating ourselves, making ourselves less sensitive for the bad times by having things like grain stores, for example. Pretty much every civilization that's lasted for any reasonable length of time has some food management principles behind it. But what's been happening over the past thirty years is it's failed - the insurance policy.
As far as being on the officials every five minutes, it's just not good for the game. The officials don't like it; you embarrass them, so it's just not good. Now, every now and then they might make a bad call, but officiating is hard.
The Republicans have a habit of having three bad years and one good one, and the good one always happens to be election years.
Once a poet always a poet, and even though I haven't written poems for a long time, I can nonetheless say that everything I've ever learned about writing lyrical fiction has been informed by three decades of writing in lines and stanzas. For me the real drama of fiction is almost always the drama of the language.
Every head turned to see two more security guards appear, each holding a Bagshaw by the back of the neck (which might have been considerably less conspicuous had the Bagshaws not been dressed as chimney sweeps). Kat turned back to Hale. 'The Mary Poppins?' 'Seemed like a good idea at the time.
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