Quotes By James Broughton

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.

Amazement awaits us at every corner.

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.

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.

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

Trusting your individual uniqueness challenges you to lay yourself open.

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.