Tony Harrison Quotes

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Tony Harrison

Profession : Poet

Birth : April 30, 1937

It's been an obsession with me from childhood, the horrors of the twentieth century.

Tony Harrison

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.

Tony Harrison

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.

Tony Harrison

The imagination has its limits, and you have to face up to that.

Tony Harrison

I'd rather climb Everest than go for a walk in the park.

Tony Harrison

I was brought up on music hall, and at the same time, I was studying Greek at the age of 12.

Tony Harrison

I like a direct relationship between actor and audience.

Tony Harrison

For me, there is a paradox in poetry, which is like the paradox in tragedy. You have the most terrible subject, but it's in a form that is so sensually gratifying that it connects the surviving heart to the despairing intellect.

Tony Harrison

I'm hoping to have a ninth decade like Matisse's.

Tony Harrison

You litter poems with too much learning when you're younger.

Tony Harrison

I hate being called poet/dramatist/translator/director. 'Poet' covers it all for me.

Tony Harrison

Coming from a very inarticulate family made me try to speak for those who can't express themselves and created a need for articulation at its most ceremonial - poetry.

Tony Harrison

I love being on the road with others, with a camera, but also being alone writing poetry.

Tony Harrison

I was well read and knew languages, but I didn't want to become Ezra Pound. I wanted to write poetry that people like my parents might respond to.

Tony Harrison

Theatre has to be theatrical. It has to draw attention to itself, like poetry.

Tony Harrison

I hate the anglicanisation of culture, the idea that culture is genteel. It's not genteel.

Tony Harrison

The ear will surrender even at those times when the eye wants to close, when the eye doesn't want to watch.

Tony Harrison

I am capable of bad taste - deliberately.

Tony Harrison

I have always loved radio as a medium.

Tony Harrison

Of course you have to provide for the vulnerable and the children, but also, the vulnerable and the children need art in some form or another. You need spiritual experiences that, I think, forms of art give best.

Tony Harrison