James Broughton Quotes

#1. My films are an extension of my poetry, using the white screen like the white page to be filled with images.

James Broughton

#2. I tried to stir the imagination and enthusiasms of students to take risks, to do what they were most afraid of doing, to widen their horizons of action.

James Broughton

#3. I had a toy theater and a magic lantern, and when I was eight I built a stage for theatricals in the attic.

James Broughton

#4. I never wanted to dilute my private passion for the art by airing and arguing it in public.

James Broughton

#5. It was as important to live poetically as to write poems.

James Broughton

#6. You're closer to your glory leaping an abyss than re-upholstering a rut.

James Broughton

#7. Amazement awaits us at every corner.

James Broughton

#8. If you don't fill your days with love, you are wasting your life.

James Broughton

#9. I often start writing in order to excite an expansive emotion.

James Broughton

#10. My major aim in writing is to set out flags and issue wake-up calls.

James Broughton

#11. Dance, vaudeville, drama, movies - as a child I loved everything that went on in a theater.

James Broughton

#12. We are all participants in the marvelous.

James Broughton

#13. Some artists shrink from self-awareness, fearing that it will destroy their unique gifts and even their desire to create. The truth of the matter is quite opposite.

James Broughton

#14. For me, prose walks, poetry dances.

James Broughton

#15. In the world of poetry there are would-be poets, workshop poets, promising poets, lovesick poets, university poets, and a few real poets.

James Broughton

#16. The most astonishing joy is to receive from the muses the gift of a whole lyric.

James Broughton

#17. I'm happy to report that my inner child is still ageless.

James Broughton

#18. The quietest poetry can be an explosion of joy.

James Broughton

#19. A born poet knows in his cradle that a poetic life is the only life worth living.

James Broughton

#20. Life is adventure, not predicament.

James Broughton

#21. Being identified as a poet in France or Denmark or India one is greeted with gracious respect.

James Broughton

#22. Poetry for me is as much a spiritual practice as sexual ecstasy is.

James Broughton

#23. Acclaim is a distraction.

James Broughton

#24. True delicacy is not a fragile thing.

James Broughton

#25. Adversity is a stimulus.

James Broughton

#26. Everything that ever happened is still happening. Past, present and future keep happening in the eternity which is Here and Now.

James Broughton

#27. For me a poem has to sing out of itself and the lilt of it carries the magic.

James Broughton

#28. Most poets, like most people, try hard to be like someone they admire or they are possessed with an image of what they ought to be.

James Broughton

#29. At every crossroad, be prepared to bump into wonder.

James Broughton

#30. And to Shakespeare I owe my vision of the world as a theater, wherein all humans are acting out their parts.

James Broughton

#31. Trusting your individual uniqueness challenges you to lay yourself open.

James Broughton

#32. Today the U.S. is farther from being nourished by poetry than it was a hundred years ago, when books of poems were best-sellers.

James Broughton

#33. The American public does not know poets exist.

James Broughton

#34. Everything is Song. Everything is Silence. Since it all turns out to be illusion, perfectly being what it is, having nothing to do with good or bad, you are free to die laughing.

James Broughton

#35. Consciousness is the glory of creation.

James Broughton

#36. If bitterness wants to get into the act, I offer it a cookie or a gumdrop.

James Broughton

#37. My earliest poems sing of the absolute necessity of allowing love to invade and pervade one's life. That can make the miracle happen in reality. Try it.

James Broughton

#38. I consider my films to be poems that are all as personal as my writing and as hand-made.

James Broughton

#39. Life's major challenge: getting reborn often enough.

James Broughton

#40. Rarest of the real poets are born poets. They are the oddballs, not the professors.

James Broughton

#41. Ultimately I have learned more about poetry, from music and magic than from literature.

James Broughton

#42. Follow your own weird.

James Broughton

#43. Work in the theater sharpened my verse and my cinema.

James Broughton

#44. I like things which appear fragile but are tough inside.

James Broughton

#45. The only limits are, as always, those of vision.

James Broughton

#46. Most poets in their youth begin in adolescent sadness. I find it more rewarding to end in gladness.

James Broughton