Ordinary Genius Quotes

“Maybe you're one of those people who writes poems, but rarely reads them. Let me put this as delicately as I can: If you don't read, your writing is going to suck.”
― Kim Addonizio, Ordinary Genius: A Guide for the Poet Within

“Imagine a sentence as a hall with a series of doors. Each door is a possible way to use what you’ve already written to generate new material.”
― Kim Addonizio, Ordinary Genius: A Guide for the Poet Within

“This is your genius: your own profound desire to write. Your love of words and language, your attempt to get to what poet Donald Hall called “the unsayable said.” If”
― Kim Addonizio, Ordinary Genius: A Guide for the Poet Within

“Poems are what you make when you experience life in a certain way. Alive to yourself in the world, observant of inner and outer reality, and connected to language”
― Kim Addonizio, Ordinary Genius: A Guide for the Poet Within

“Today I found a twenty in the red-lined pocket of my wool coat. There’s no twenty-dollar bill in the red lining of my uterus.”
― Kim Addonizio, Ordinary Genius: A Guide for the Poet Within

“The truth is, life is difficult and intense. The beauty is that we have art and love to give us solace, and joy, a reason to live and a reason to care about what happens in, and to, the world.”
― Kim Addonizio, Ordinary Genius: A Guide for the Poet Within

“Beginning writers tend to think that craft is their enemy. As long as they believe that, they will remain beginners, no matter how many years they write.”
― Kim Addonizio, Ordinary Genius: A Guide for the Poet Within

“Picasso said, “Art is a lie that makes us realize the truth.”
― Kim Addonizio, Ordinary Genius: A Guide for the Poet Within

“Reading is like food to a writer; without it, the writer part of you will die—or become spindly and stunted.”
― Kim Addonizio, Ordinary Genius: A Guide for the Poet Within

“The artists who copied Rembrandt did so to learn about painting, not to be lesser versions of the master. They imitated as a way of looking closely, and then used what they had learned to develop their own work, brushstroke by brushstroke. Line by line, you can do the same.”
― Kim Addonizio, Ordinary Genius: A Guide for the Poet Within

“Forget wondering, Am I good enough? Can I do this? The only thing you really need to ask yourself is: Is writing my genius? If it is, then apprentice yourself.”
― Kim Addonizio, Ordinary Genius: A Guide for the Poet Within

“Details convince; they persuade us that the writer has looked closely at the world, and they bring us close to the world the writer is creating.”
― Kim Addonizio, Ordinary Genius: A Guide for the Poet Within