Richard Hugo Quotes

Think small.... If you can't think small, try philosophy or social criticism.

In the world of imagination, all things belong.

Don't write with a pen. Ink tends to give the impression the words shouldn't be changed.

Scholars look for final truths they will never find. Creative writers concern themselves with possibilities that are always there to the receptive.

An act of imagination is an act of self-acceptance.

You owe reality nothing and the truth about your feelings everything.

A poet is seldom hard up for advice. The worst part of it all is that sometimes the advice is coming from other poets, and they ought to know better.

Assuming you can write clear English sentences, give up all worry about communication. If you want to communicate, use the telephone.

A good creative-writing teacher can save a good writer a lot of time.

A creative writing class may be one of the last places you can go where your life still matters.

You are someone and you have a right to your life.

Lucky accidents seldom happen to writers who don't work. You will find that you may rewrite and rewrite a poem and it never seems quite right. Then a much better poem may come rather fast and you wonder why you bothered with all that work on the earlier poem. Actually, the hard work you do on one poem is put in on all poems. The hard work on the first poem is responsible for the sudden ease of the second. If you just sit around waiting for the easy ones, nothing will come. Get to work.

...an imagined town is at least as real as an actual town. If it isn't, you may be in the wrong business. Our words come from obsessions we must submit to, whatever the social cost. It can be hard. It can be worse forty years from now if you feel you could have done it and didn't. It is narcissistic, vain, egotistical, unrealistic, selfish, and hateful to assume emotional ownership of a town or a word. It is also essential.

To write a poem you must have a streak of arrogance-- not in real life I hope. In real life try to be nice. It will save you a hell of a lot of trouble and give you more time to write.

Don't write love poems when you're in love. Write them when you're not in love.

Never write a poem about anything that ought to have a poem written about it.

Never want to say anything so strongly that you give up the option of finding something better. If you have to say it, you will.

I think it's better if you write poems that look like you.

Maximum sentence length: seventeen words. Minimum:one No semicolons. Semicolons indicate relationships that only idiots need defined by punctuation. Besides, they are ugly. Make sure each sentence is at least four words longer or shorter than the one before it.

If you want to communicate, use the telephone