Wallace Stevens Quotes

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Wallace Stevens

Profession : Poet

Birth : October 2, 1879

A poem need not have a meaning and like most things in nature often does not have.

Wallace Stevens

The point of vision and desire are the same.

Wallace Stevens

The philosopher proves that the philosopher exists. The poet merely enjoys existence.

Wallace Stevens

It can never be satisfied, the mind, never.

Wallace Stevens

Thought is an infection. In the case of certain thoughts, it becomes an epidemic.

Wallace Stevens

Most people read poetry listening for echoes because the echoes are familiar to them. They wade through it the way a boy wades through water, feeling with his toes for the bottom: The echoes are the bottom.

Wallace Stevens

If some really acute observer made as much of egotism as Freud has made of sex, people would forget a good deal about sex and find the explanation for everything in egotism.

Wallace Stevens

One cannot spend one's time in being modern when there are so many more important things to be.

Wallace Stevens

Intolerance respecting other people's religion is toleration itself in comparison with intolerance respecting other people's art.

Wallace Stevens

The genuine artist is never 'true to life.' He sees what is real, but not as we are normally aware of it. We do not go storming through life like actors in a play. Art is never real life.

Wallace Stevens

Perhaps it is of more value to infuriate philosophers than to go along with them.

Wallace Stevens

Reality is not what it is. It consists of the many realities which it can be made into.

Wallace Stevens

How full of trifles everything is! It is only one's thoughts that fill a room with something more than furniture.

Wallace Stevens

Nothing could be more inappropriate to American literature than its English source since the Americans are not British in sensibility.

Wallace Stevens

The fire burns as the novel taught it how.

Wallace Stevens

As life grows more terrible, its literature grows more terrible.

Wallace Stevens

The reason can give nothing at all Like the response to desire.

Wallace Stevens

If poetry should address itself to the same needs and aspirations, the same hopes and fears, to which the Bible addresses itself, it might rival it in distribution.

Wallace Stevens

New York is a field of tireless and antagonistic interests undoubtedly fascinating but horribly unreal. Everybody is looking at everybody else a foolish crowd walking on mirrors.

Wallace Stevens