Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American director James Broughton.
Last updated on November 15, 2024.
James Broughton was an American poet and poetic filmmaker. He was part of the San Francisco Renaissance, a precursor to the Beat poets. He was an early bard of the Radical Faeries, as well as a member of The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, serving the community as Sister Sermonetta.
Rarest of the real poets are born poets. They are the oddballs, not the professors.
My major aim in writing is to set out flags and issue wake-up calls.
Adversity is a stimulus.
I tried to stir the imagination and enthusiasms of students to take risks, to do what they were most afraid of doing, to widen their horizons of action.
I never wanted to dilute my private passion for the art by airing and arguing it in public.
My earliest poems sing of the absolute necessity of allowing love to invade and pervade one's life. That can make the miracle happen in reality. Try it.
Most poets, like most people, try hard to be like someone they admire or they are possessed with an image of what they ought to be.
A born poet knows in his cradle that a poetic life is the only life worth living.
Everything is Song. Everything is Silence. Since it all turns out to be illusion, perfectly being what it is, having nothing to do with good or bad, you are free to die laughing.
Acclaim is a distraction.
If you don't fill your days with love, you are wasting your life.
Some artists shrink from self-awareness, fearing that it will destroy their unique gifts and even their desire to create. The truth of the matter is quite opposite.
Consciousness is the glory of creation.
For me a poem has to sing out of itself and the lilt of it carries the magic.
And to Shakespeare I owe my vision of the world as a theater, wherein all humans are acting out their parts.
The quietest poetry can be an explosion of joy.
In the world of poetry there are would-be poets, workshop poets, promising poets, lovesick poets, university poets, and a few real poets.
Being identified as a poet in France or Denmark or India one is greeted with gracious respect.
I often start writing in order to excite an expansive emotion.
I consider my films to be poems that are all as personal as my writing and as hand-made.
True delicacy is not a fragile thing.
The only limits are, as always, those of vision.
Dance, vaudeville, drama, movies - as a child I loved everything that went on in a theater.
I like things which appear fragile but are tough inside.
Everything that ever happened is still happening. Past, present and future keep happening in the eternity which is Here and Now.
Poetry for me is as much a spiritual practice as sexual ecstasy is.
The American public does not know poets exist.
If bitterness wants to get into the act, I offer it a cookie or a gumdrop.
I had a toy theater and a magic lantern, and when I was eight I built a stage for theatricals in the attic.
The most astonishing joy is to receive from the muses the gift of a whole lyric.
My films are an extension of my poetry, using the white screen like the white page to be filled with images.
I'm happy to report that my inner child is still ageless.
For me, prose walks, poetry dances.
Today the U.S. is farther from being nourished by poetry than it was a hundred years ago, when books of poems were best-sellers.
Most poets in their youth begin in adolescent sadness. I find it more rewarding to end in gladness.
Amazement awaits us at every corner.
Trusting your individual uniqueness challenges you to lay yourself open.
Work in the theater sharpened my verse and my cinema.
Life is adventure, not predicament.
It was as important to live poetically as to write poems.
We are all participants in the marvelous.
At every crossroad, be prepared to bump into wonder.
Ultimately I have learned more about poetry, from music and magic than from literature.
Follow your own weird.
Life's major challenge: getting reborn often enough.
You're closer to your glory leaping an abyss than re-upholstering a rut.