The writer, the poet, the novelist, are all creators. This does not mean that they invent language; it means that they use language to create beauty, ideas, images. This is why we cannot do without them.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
The aim of the poet, or other artist, is first to make something; and it's impossible to make something out of words and not communicate.
If a writer doesn't do anything but give a new word to his language and, from there, maybe to other languages, I think that writer redefines the world.
Real novelists, those we admire, those we consider timeless in their language and character and scene, those who receive accolades for inventive language and form, have writing lives we imagine in specific ways.
A writer is a tool of the language rather than the other way around.
The Language Poets are writing only about language itself. The Ashbery poets are writing only about poetry itself. That seems to me a kind of dead end.
Poets are seen as the caretakers of language, so working with words no matter what the form is what we do.
Writers and painters alike are in the business of consulting their own imaginations, and stimulating the imaginations of others. Together, and separately, they celebrate the absolute mystery of otherness.
I'm not a writer. I know a lot of writers; I know a handful of really excellent, great ones, and I know what they're like. They are in love with language. They're obsessed with it. Even if their thoughts aren't more special than anybody else's, they have a way of putting them into words that makes them sensational.
There are many reasons why novelists write, but they all have one thing in common - a need to create an alternative world.
Poetry is the work of poets, not of peoples or communities; artistic creation can never be anything but the production of an individual mind.