James Broughton

“It was as important to live poetically as to write poems.”

“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.”

“Acclaim is a distraction.”

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

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

“Amazement awaits us at every corner.”

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

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

“True delicacy is not a fragile thing.”

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

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

“Work in the theater sharpened my verse and my cinema.”

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

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