Quotes By James Broughton

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

Work in the theater sharpened my verse and my cinema.

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

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.

Consciousness is the glory of creation.

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

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

True delicacy is not a fragile thing.

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

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

The quietest poetry can be an explosion of joy.

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

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

Adversity is a stimulus.

The American public does not know poets exist.

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

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

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.

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

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

Amazement awaits us at every corner.

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

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.

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

I like things which appear fragile but are tough inside.

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.

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.

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

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.

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