Peter Porter Quotations

Love without sex is still the most efficient form of hell known to man.

In other words the pictures are in a kind of relationship with each other which is touching only at points rather than pictures being illustrations of poems or poems extrapolations of the pictures.

I have no fondness for pure form at all.

You can never tell when an artist really will take up someone's work and work with it happily.

As to whether the people who were supposedly to put up the money and did put it up or whether it was Arthur's own money is something which I shall never know.

I started off in England and very few people knew I was Australian. I mean, the clues were in the poems, but they didn't read them very carefully, and so for years and years I was considered completely part of the English poetry scene.

I wanted to take a stand against what I think was not so well established then but is thoroughly well established now, which is the substitution for a real sense of a country of a hideous distortion which you can sell to the people called 'heritage'.

The Natural world, in fact, enters us and becomes ,well, becomes really a kind of life, it has a pilgrimage through us.

It is Australian innocence to love The naturally excessive and be proud Of a thoroughbred gelding who ran fast.

I am moving deeper into my own brain.

Auden is an accomplished rhymer and Shakespeare is not.

An old art spreading rumours about / Paradise, it begs outside the gates / Of the gods: the active gods come out.

A poem is a form of refrigeration that stops language going bad.

We cannot know what John of Leyden felt Under the Bishop 's tongs - we can only Walk in temperate London, our educated city, Wishing to cry as freely as they did who died In the Age of Faith. We have our loneliness And our regret with which to build an eschatology.

In the New World, happiness is enforced.

Redeemers always reach the world too late. God dies, we live; God lives, we die. Our fate.

Much have I travelled in the realms of gold for which I thank the Paddington and Westminster Public Libraries.

Somewhere at the heart of the universe sounds the true mystic note: Me.

Writing poetry is the only form of literary labour which gives me entire satisfaction.

A professional is one who believes he has invented breathing.

Poetry is either language lit up by life or life lit up by language