James Tate Quotes

#1. When you don't sleep, you start to hallucinate, and that's not good.

James Tate

#2. Poetry is everywhere; it just needs editing.

James Tate

#3. When people start talking about enjambment and line endings, I always shut them up. This is not something to talk about, this is a private matter, it's up to the poet.

James Tate

#4. I was just sitting on my bed in a dormitory room, and I started writing. The thing that was magic about it was that once you put down one word, you could cross it out. I figured that out right away. I put down 'mountain,' and then I'd go, 'No - 'valley.' That's better.'

James Tate

#5. He is being nibbled to death by ducks.

--More Later, Less the Same

James Tate

#6. Having gray hair doesn't matter
but having gray matter matters.

James Tate

#7. Dust is watching life's talk show.

James Tate

#8. I like to start with the ordinary, and then nudge it, and then think, 'What happens next, what happens next?'

James Tate

#9. I am not a part of this home any longer. I am a tiny thing created by indifferent scientists. I am an experiment, a mechanical bee placed near the hive. The real bees were happy being bees until I came along and gave them all the false information that destroyed their little lives.

James Tate

#10. I don't think you can define how you acquire your imagination any more than you can define why one person has a sense of humor and another doesn't. But I certainly would lean to the side that says all those solitary hours of daydreaming were a kind of training for poetry.

James Tate

#11. Everybody who was anybody seemed to be going to a meeting, the glowworm, who was a solipsist, the lemur who was not.

James Tate

#12. If you laughed earlier in the poem, and I bring you close to tears in the end, that's the best.

James Tate

#13. I can't know entirely what's at stake beforehand; you find out as you go. I love to take a poem, for instance, that starts with something seemingly frivolous or inconsequential and then grows in gravity until by the end it's something very serious.

James Tate

#14. In You Are Not Dead Wendy Xu breaks all the old rules that have never done us any favors anyway. She writes beautifully, noticing who we are, and letting us see ourselves with a little more humanity, a little more humor, a little more humility. I'm happy to have read this book.

James Tate

#15. The challenge is always to find the ultimate in the ordinary horseshit.

James Tate

#16. William Waltz will take me through 'the buzz and clamor in a forest of hearts.' Adventures in the Lost Interiors of America is an adventure, I will go on this adventure with Waltz as a skillful, faithful, compass-true guide. I love this book.

James Tate

#17. Something should always change in a poem. The persona should learn something.

James Tate

#18. I love my funny poems, but I'd rather break your heart. And if I can do both in the same poem, that's the best.

James Tate

#19. almost exquisite, the slight madness

James Tate

#20. I couldn't even picture Mavis's face anymore. It was sad. She was being erased. I wanted to put my finger on her forehead, but there was nothing there.

James Tate