James Broughton Quotes

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.

Poetry for me is as much a spiritual practice as sexual ecstasy is.

Dance, vaudeville, drama, movies - as a child I loved everything that went on in a theater.

Being identified as a poet in France or Denmark or India one is greeted with gracious respect.

My major aim in writing is to set out flags and issue wake-up calls.

And to Shakespeare I owe my vision of the world as a theater, wherein all humans are acting out their parts.

A born poet knows in his cradle that a poetic life is the only life worth living.

It was as important to live poetically as to write poems.

The only limits are, as always, those of vision.

If you don't fill your days with love, you are wasting your life.

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.

I often start writing in order to excite an expansive emotion.

I never wanted to dilute my private passion for the art by airing and arguing it in public.

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.

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.

Amazement awaits us at every corner.

Consciousness is the glory of creation.

Trusting your individual uniqueness challenges you to lay yourself open.

Acclaim is a distraction.

Ultimately I have learned more about poetry, from music and magic than from literature.

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.

Most poets in their youth begin in adolescent sadness. I find it more rewarding to end in gladness.

Life is adventure, not predicament.

For me a poem has to sing out of itself and the lilt of it carries the magic.

If bitterness wants to get into the act, I offer it a cookie or a gumdrop.

Everything that ever happened is still happening. Past, present and future keep happening in the eternity which is Here and Now.

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.

For me, prose walks, poetry dances.

In the world of poetry there are would-be poets, workshop poets, promising poets, lovesick poets, university poets, and a few real poets.

Adversity is a stimulus.

At every crossroad, be prepared to bump into wonder.

I'm happy to report that my inner child is still ageless.

We are all participants in the marvelous.

I like things which appear fragile but are tough inside.

I consider my films to be poems that are all as personal as my writing and as hand-made.

You're closer to your glory leaping an abyss than re-upholstering a rut.

Life's major challenge: getting reborn often enough.

Follow your own weird.

My films are an extension of my poetry, using the white screen like the white page to be filled with images.