Basil Bunting Quotes

#1. Always carry a corkscrew and the wine shall provide itself.

Basil Bunting

#2. Prose exists to convey meaning, and no meaning such as prose conveys can be expressed as well in poetry. That's not poetry's purpose.

Basil Bunting

#3. The mason stirs.
Words!
Pens are too light.
Take a chisel to write.

Basil Bunting

#4. Can a moment of madness make up for an age of consent?

Basil Bunting

#5. Our doom is, to be sifted by the wind, heaped up, smoothed down like silly sands. We are less permanent than thought.

Basil Bunting

#6. The times are squalid. They always were. It is a poet's duty to hold the line.

Basil Bunting

#7. Compose aloud: poetry is a sound. Never explain- your reader is as smart as you. Your reader is not just any reader, but is the rare one with ears in his head.

Basil Bunting

#8. Sooner or later we must absorb Islam if our own culture is not to die of anemia.

Basil Bunting

#9. I hate Science. It denies a man's responsibility for his own deeds, abolishes the brotherhood that springs from God's fatherhood. It is a hectoring, dictating expertise, which makes the least lovable of the Church Fathers seem liberal by contrast.

Basil Bunting

#10. Whether you listen to a piece of music, or a poem, or look at a picture or a jug, or a piece of sculpture, what matters about it is not what it has in common with others of its kind, but what is singularly its own.

Basil Bunting

#11. Men are fools to invest in real estate.

Basil Bunting

#12. To appreciate present conditions, collate them with those of antiquity.

Basil Bunting

#13. But their determination to banish fools foundered ultimately in the installation of absolute idiots.

Basil Bunting

#14. Name and date split in soft slate a few months obliterate. 166

Basil Bunting

#15. And always the cutting out and the buggering about and the buggering about and the rewriting and so on ...

Basil Bunting

#16. The mystic purchases a moment of exhilaration with a lifetime of confusion; and the confusion is infectious and destructive. It is confusing and destructive to try and explain anything in terms of anything else, poetry in terms of psychology.

Basil Bunting

#17. Praise the green earth. Chance has appointed her home, workshop, larder, middenpit. Her lousy skin scabbed here and there by cities provides us with name and nation.

Basil Bunting