Mary Oliver Quotes

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Mary Oliver

Profession : Poet

Birth : September 10, 1935

There were times over the years when life was not easy, but if you're working a few hours a day and you've got a good book to read, and you can go outside to the beach and dig for clams, you're okay.

Mary Oliver

Apparently, I've been considered a recluse.

Mary Oliver

The challenge is to keep up with all the new poets at the same time I love the old ones.

Mary Oliver

It's very important to write things down instantly, or you can lose the way you were thinking out a line. I have a rule that if I wake up at 3 in the morning and think of something, I write it down. I can't wait until morning - it'll be gone.

Mary Oliver

As a child, what captivated me was reading the poems myself and realizing that there was a world without material substance which was nevertheless as alive as any other.

Mary Oliver

I would rather write poems than prose, any day, any place. Yet each has its own force.

Mary Oliver

I know the sag of the unfinished poem. And I know the release of the poem that is finished.

Mary Oliver

I have a notebook with me all the time, and I begin scribbling a few words. When things are going well, the walk does not get anywhere; I finally just stop and write.

Mary Oliver

I've always wanted to write poems and nothing else.

Mary Oliver

I like books that are fat and full.

Mary Oliver

I was very careful never to take an interesting job. If you have an interesting job, you get interested in it.

Mary Oliver

I learn a lot about my poems when I read them by the way people respond to them.

Mary Oliver

Poetry is meant to be heard.

Mary Oliver

I'd rather write about polar bears than people.

Mary Oliver

People want poetry. They need poetry. They get it. They don't want fancy work.

Mary Oliver

I love the line of Flaubert about observing things very intensely. I think our duty as writers begins not with our own feelings, but with the powers of observing.

Mary Oliver

To tell you the truth, I believe everything - tigers, trees, stones - are sentient in one way or another. You'd never catch me idly kicking a stone, for example.

Mary Oliver

At the time I was growing up, literature was involved with the so-called confessional poets. And I was not interested in that. I did not think that specific and personal perspective functioned well for the reader at all.

Mary Oliver

If I've done my work well, I vanish completely from the scene. I believe it is invasive of the work when you know too much about the writer.

Mary Oliver

My first two books are out of print and, okay, they can sleep there comfortably. It's early work, derivative work.

Mary Oliver