Quotes By James Broughton

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

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.

Trusting your individual uniqueness challenges you to lay yourself open.

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

Acclaim is a distraction.

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

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

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

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

For me, prose walks, poetry dances.

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

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

Work in the theater sharpened my verse and my cinema.

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.

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

True delicacy is not a fragile thing.

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.

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

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.

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