William Carlos Williams

"Who isn’t frustrated and does not prove it by his actions — if you want to say so? But through art the psychologically maimed may become the most distinguished man of his age. Take Freud for instance."

"It is in tune with the tempo of life — scattered yet welded into the whole, — broken, yet woven together."

"Poets are being pursued by the philosophers today, out of the poverty of philosophy. God damn it, you might think a man had no business to be writing, to be a poet unless some philosophic stinker gave…"

"I thought my friends were damn fools, because they didn't know any better way of conducting their lives. Still they conformed better than I to a code. I wanted to conform but I couldn't so I wrote my …"

"There’s nothing sentimental about a machine, and: A poem is a small machine made of words."

"When a man makes a poem, makes it, mind you, he takes words as he finds them interrelated about him and composes them — without distortion which would mar their exact significances — into an intense e…"

"The art of the poem nowadays is something unstable; but at least the construction of the poem should make sense; you should know where you stand. Many questions haven't been answered as yet. Our poets…"

"Being an art form, verse cannot be "free" in the sense of having no limitations or guiding principle."