C. K. Williams Quotes

#1. I am your own personal verb now.

C. K. Williams

#2. The more I write, the more the silence seems to be eating away at me.

C. K. Williams

#3. I tended to write poems about both social and spiritual problems, and some problems one doesn't really want to solve, and so the problems themselves are solved. You certainly don't want to solve problems in poems that haven't been solved in the world.

C. K. Williams

#4. Wasn't I rapt?
Wasn't I ravished?

C. K. Williams

#5. Sometimes you have a poem that you really want to write and it never happens.

C. K. Williams

#6. I don't think of reflection on dark things as necessarily dark.

C. K. Williams

#7. Poems have a different music from ordinary language, and every poem has a different kind of music of necessity, and that's, in a way, the hardest thing about writing poetry is waiting for that music, and sometimes you never know if it's going to come.

C. K. Williams

#8. This is the wisdom of art, the knowledge that beauty perhaps is the one undeniably unique attribute of the human.

C. K. Williams

#9. One becomes a grandfather and one sees the world a little differently. Certainly the world becomes a more vulnerable place when one has a grandchild, or now I have two. And I think that possibly there's some tenderness that came out of just time and age and being a parent and grandparent.

C. K. Williams

#10. I don't like denial. I don't like repression.

C. K. Williams

#11. My father read poetry to me, encouraged me to memorize poems. But the writing of it was quite a different thing.

C. K. Williams

#12. Poetry confronts in the most clear-eyed way just those emotions which consciousness wishes to slide by.

C. K. Williams

#13. If you spend your whole life being depressed about life, you're wasting it.

C. K. Williams

#14. Even the leftover carats of tar in the gutter, so black they seemed to suck
the light out of the air.
By nightfall kids had come across them: every sidewalk on the block was
scribbled with obscenities and hearts.

C. K. Williams

#15. When you begin to write poems because you love language, because you love poetry. Something happens that makes you write poems. And the writing of poems is incredibly pleasurable and addictive.

C. K. Williams

#16. Maybe shy is when you're lonely and you don't think anybody can help you.

C. K. Williams

#17. A dark poem is meant to redeem the dark part.

C. K. Williams