English - Poet | April 30, 1937 -
I think it's the tendency to want to create gods and monotheistic absolutes and absolute certainties that is the continual temptation in human thought - that's the great danger. Every time we create a god, we diminish humanity.
Tony Harrison
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One of the important things about familiar form and metricality is that it draws attention to the physical nature of language: the spell-binding nature of it and the ceremony of articulation.
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I believe more in the power of drama than in the power of religion.
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A lot of my activity in the theatre, and even in writing poems, was a kind of retrospective aggro on the English teacher who wouldn't allow me to read poetry aloud.
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I need to look back on my poetic ventures, make sense of them as a whole, and move forward... and to experiment without external demands.
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Honours seem to be the nature of British life. It's horrible. Maybe I'm mad, but the older I get, the less I want to have honours loaded on me.
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I really admire the great Japanese artists who could change their name three times in a lifetime. You could get rid of one and renew yourself.
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I wanted to learn Latin and Greek and become a poet and acquire power over language. I only understand this clearly in retrospect, that my ability to study came from a hunger to learn all the resources of articulation.
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Poetry is all I write, whether for books or readings or for the National Theatre or for the opera house and concert hall or even for TV.
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It's been an obsession with me from childhood, the horrors of the twentieth century.
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Looking back, fire images have been constant in my poetry. As a boy, it was my job to light the fire each morning, and I remember the celebratory bonfires at the end of the war. It was from staring into fire that I began my first poetry.
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There's a kind of despair about whether art can really do anything, but you have to incorporate that despair into the way you work. I try to soak my work in my sense of futility and fury.
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