Paul Muldoon quotes

Words want to find chimes with each other, things want to connect. (Paul Muldoon)
I certainly am interested in accessibility, clarity, and immediacy. View quote
Paul Muldoon
Living at that pitch, on that edge, is something which many poets engage in to some extent. View quote
Paul Muldoon
One will never again look at a birch tree, after the Robert Frost poem, in exactly the same way. View quote
Paul Muldoon
The point of poetry is to be acutely discomforting, to prod and provoke, to poke us in the eye, to punch us in the nose, to knock us off our feet, to take our breath away. View quote
Paul Muldoon
Form is a straitjacket in the way that a straitjacket was a straitjacket for Houdini. View quote
Paul Muldoon
If the poem has no obvious destination, there's a chance that we'll be all setting off on an interesting ride. View quote
Paul Muldoon
For whatever reason, people, including very well-educated people or people otherwise interested in reading, do not read poetry. View quote
Paul Muldoon
I believe that these devices like repetition and rhyme are not artificial, that they're not imposed, somehow, on the language. View quote
Paul Muldoon
Your average pop song or film is a very sophisticated item, with very sophisticated ways of listening and viewing that we have not really consciously developed over the years - because we were having such a good time. View quote
Paul Muldoon
I do a lot of readings. (Paul Muldoon)
That's one of the great things about poetry; one realises that one does one's little turn - that you're just part of the great crop, as it were. View quote
Paul Muldoon
It seems to me the structure of the Quartets is too imposed. View quote
Paul Muldoon
Obviously one of the things that poets from Northern Ireland and beyond - had to try to make sense of was what was happening on a day-to-day political level. View quote
Paul Muldoon
Of course, you can't legislate for how people are going to read. View quote
Paul Muldoon
On the other hand, at some level the mass of unresolved issues in Northern Ireland does influence the fact that there are so many good writers in the place. View quote
Paul Muldoon
The ground swell is what's going to sink you as well as being what buoys you up. These are cliches also, of course, and I'm sometimes interested in how much one can get away with. View quote
Paul Muldoon
I suppose for whatever reason I actively welcome being put down, something which perhaps goes back to my upbringing - that accusation of not being worthy which could be laid at one's door. View quote
Paul Muldoon
I'm sure 50 percent of television ads use rhyme. View quote
Paul Muldoon
I was born in Northern Ireland in 1951. I lived most of my life there until 1986 or 1987. View quote
Paul Muldoon
What I try to do is to go into a poem - and one writes them, of course, poem by poem - to go into each poem, first of all without having any sense whatsoever of where it's going to end up. (Paul Muldoon)
I live in New Jersey now, which always gets a bad rap here and there, but I must say, I enjoy living here too. View quote
Paul Muldoon
We simply have not kept in touch with poetry. View quote
Paul Muldoon
Frost isn't exactly despised but not enough people have worked out what a brilliant poet he was. View quote
Paul Muldoon
The other side of it is that, despite all that, people reach out to poetry at the key moments in their lives. View quote
Paul Muldoon