Denise Duhamel Quotes

#1. Visual media is the dominant art form in our present day culture, whereas poetry is, at best, a proxy. Yet poetry and film are both "dream factories."

Denise Duhamel

#2. After my marriage ended, I had an urge to skip that part of my life completely in terms of poetry, not publish anything at all about it.

Denise Duhamel

#3. Not that a poem can "hurt" someone the same way a physical blow can or even a mean remark can ... I just felt unsure that my tone would be taken the right way and/or unsure of my own writing, that I couldn't maintain the tone I wanted.

Denise Duhamel

#4. American women think that clothes fit them if they can fit into them. But that's not at all what fit means.

Fran Lebowitz

#5. I don't know if there are topics that I unconsciously avoid, but as soon as they pop up in my writing, I try to take on those topics, whether or not I publish the poems.

Denise Duhamel

#6. The "truth" is the poem itself. Just because someone writes a poem about a feeling she has does not mean that the feeling will stay forever. The truth of the emotion of the poem remains, even if the particular truth of the poet changes.

Denise Duhamel

#7. Writing is performative - and while, yes, the words in essence will be there "forever," poems are often about ecstatic moments rather than trying to pin down a particular truth of an event.

Denise Duhamel

#8. Unlike Woody Allen, I would be happy to be part of any (poetry) club that would have me.

Denise Duhamel

#9. Over the years, I became more and more interested in the forms and techniques in which things could be said.

Denise Duhamel

#10. As a teenager, I loved acting, painting, photography, and making films with my friend's Super 8 camera. But I always loved writing the best. I chose writing even before I knew poetry was available to me.

Denise Duhamel

#11. Though it does seem like I have written an immense amount of work, over the years I have pushed the pause button. I have poems that I haven't sent out for publication, mostly based on political/social issues.

Denise Duhamel

#12. I also could see myself as a stand-up comedian, a fashion designer (for people of all sizes), a hairdresser, an earnest and eventually burnt-out politician, or the owner of a small bistro. But I fear that, without poetry, I would have simply been going through the motions.

Denise Duhamel

#13. I know writers for whom the act of writing is a necessary chore. They suffer to write great work. I am very lucky that for me writing is a delight.

Denise Duhamel

#14. The spoken word community was significant in making me want to write accessible and urgent poems. Bob Holman, in particular, was an impressive figure.

Denise Duhamel

#15. While poetry was less professionalized than it is now, I still had this urge to win prizes and see my work in magazines, to get an "A," as though poetry could be graded. I wish I had been more patient and less frantic about getting published.

Denise Duhamel

#16. I love going to movie theaters, even in the era of movies on-demand and Netflix. When you are in a movie theater, no one can reach you by phone or other means.

Denise Duhamel

#17. You can be courageous in admitting your sin precisely because God is richly abundant in his mercy. He comes to you in mercy not because you are good but because you are a sinner, and he knows that because of this condition, you are unable to help yourself.

Paul David Tripp

#18. If you are my friend and say to me, "Please don't write about this," I won't.

Denise Duhamel

#19. Jean Valentine and Jane Cooper were my professors at Sarah Lawrence College - and they were uncompromised in their art. They gave me models of how to live one's life as a poet.

Denise Duhamel

#20. I wish I'd been alive when the internet was invented. I'd have sold so many more books ...

A.A. Milne

#21. The "biggest" poems I ever made are based on the psychological principal of the "Johari Window:" what the self freely shares with others; what the self hides from others; what others hide from the self; and what is unknown to the self and others.

Denise Duhamel

#22. I still write what I need to write - but I can't deny that something has changed when I think about sending work out. Maybe it's just growing older and feeling more responsible to the world.

Denise Duhamel

#23. My advice to my younger self would have been, "Chill. Concentrate on the poems. Everything else will work itself out."

Denise Duhamel

#24. I started wanting desperately to say something, to make a point, to be heard - and I still feel that way. Free verse served me best when I embarked on poetry.

Denise Duhamel

#25. I am open to squeezing in whatever I can in this wonderful life. Instead of asking, "Is that all there is?" I seem, lately, to be always saying, "Wow!"

Denise Duhamel

#26. Buddhist Barbie"
In the 5th century B.C.
an Indian philosopher
Gautama teaches "All is emptiness"
and "There is no self."
In the 20th century A.D.
Barbie agrees, but wonders how a man
with such a belly could pose,
smiling, and without a shirt.

Denise Duhamel

#27. What? Were you born stupid, or did you just die that way?

Neal Shusterman

#28. What has stayed true in my life as a writer is my dedication to writing - I try to write every day, no matter what - and the joy that writing has given me.

Denise Duhamel

#29. I am interested in the confines of the page and busting through/off the page as well. A writer must let go of the line when writing prose poems, which brings its own pleasures.

Denise Duhamel

#30. The goods of fidelity, for example, are plain and concrete to the man who has not strayed, but they are faint, like mathematical abstractions, to the one who is addicted to other men's wives.

J. Budziszewski

#31. There are many young talents in Brazil. There is a lot of hope in Felipe Massa. It is very difficult to judge him in his first year, but by the end of the end we are going to have a better position how he does in Formula One.

Emerson Fittipaldi