A Quote by Tony Harrison

I've always had the wish, the need, and the obsession to become a public poet. — © Tony Harrison
I've always had the wish, the need, and the obsession to become a public poet.
If the poet wants to be a poet, the poet must force the poet to revise. If the poet doesn't wish to revise, let the poet abandon poetry and take up stamp-collecting or real estate.
A young poet in America should not be advised at the outset to give up all for the Muse-to seclude himself in the country, to live hand from mouth in Greenwich Village or to escape to the Riviera. I should not advise him even to become a magazine editor or work in a publisher's office. The poet would do better to study a profession, to become a banker or a public official or even to go in for the movies.
There is this tendency to think that if you could only find the magic way, then you could become a poet. "Tell me how to become a poet. Tell me what to do." . . . What makes you a poet is a gift for language, an ability to see into the heart of things, and an ability to deal with important unconscious material. When all these things come together, you're a poet. But there isn't one little gimmick that makes you a poet. There isn't any formula for it.
I'm less shy now than I was as a kid. After Flight 1549, my family and I had to become public figures and more complete versions of ourselves. I had to teach myself to become an effective public speaker.
Yinzer: DAMN!! I wish I had your balls! Tucker:"I wish you had a breath mint, but I guess we don't always get what we wish for.
A poet should always be 'collaborating' with his public, but this public, in the mass, cannot make itself heard, and he has to guess at its requirements and its criticisms.
The fact that you wish to become extremely successful must mean that you currently do not see yourself as such. Therefore, you need to change. The question you should be asking is what do you need to become?
My father is a poet, my stepmother is a poet, and so I always had encouragement as a child to write.
I'm not a poet. I wish I was a poet but I'm not. I'm a playwright. And so I have a different set of antecedents.
Don't wish it was easier, wish you were better. Don't wish for less problems, wish for more skills. Don't wish for less challenges, wish for more wisdom. The major value in life is not what you get. The major value in life is what you become. Success is not to be pursued; it is to be attracted by the person you become.
As regards literary culture, it fascinates me that it has been so resilient to the Union. For example, when T.S. Eliot wanted to become poet in these lands, it wasn't as an English poet, it was an Anglian poet he wanted to be.
I wish I hadn't worked so hard; I wish I'd had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me; I wish I'd had the courage to express my feelings; I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends; and I wish I had let myself be happier. It's an extraordinary list of getting in your own way, isn't it?
You always think "woulda, coulda, shoulda." I wish that I had prosecuted Tot Mom, I wish I'd prosecuted OJ, and I wish I had prosecuted the JonBenet Ramsey case.
A poet is not a public figure. A poet should be read and not seen.
Responding to climate change will become the obsession of the next decade in much the same way terrorism was this decade's obsession.
I started out as a poet. I've always been a poet since I was 7 or 8. And so I feel myself to be fundamentally a poet who got into writing novels.
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