Antoine de Saint-Exupery

"It is impossible to survive on refrigerators, politics, balance sheets, and crossword puzzles, you see! It is impossible! It is impossible to live without poetry and colour and love."

from  The Writer's Brush, Donald Friedman, 2007, Mid-List Press, Minneapolis, p. 320.

The love poetry omnibus

The love poetry omnibus: Download the special extended podcast of the full collection of love poems from all our guests.
Poetica

Ariadne project

360documentaries 26 February 2012

http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/360/the-ariadne-project/3829396

Heartbreak is a 4,000 year old story - so why do couples who've separated always feel so unique in their agony? In the Ariadne project we examine the anatomy of love and loss, with moving and insightful stories from you, our listeners, as contributed to ABC Pool, last year. But it's not all darkness and tragedy, at the end of the ancient Greek myth, beautiful Ariadne, abandoned by heroic Theseus on a beach, winds up with Dionysus, the God of wine and desire.

Benjamin Franklin

"... he'd developed a style, making up for  a lack of poetic ability with a sly sense of humour and developing the condensed, pointed edge of the aphorism ... a method particularly suited to speaking out against old institutions ..."

"If you would not be forgotten,
as soon as you are dead and rotten, 
either write things worth reading,
or do things worth the writing."
Benjamin Franklin

Robert Frost 'The Figure a Poem Makes'

"Like a piece of ice on a hot stove the poem must ride on its own melting. A poem may be worked over once it is in being, but may not be worried into being. Its most precious quality will remain its having run itself and carried away the poet with it. Read it a hundred times: it will forever keep its freshness as a metal keeps its fragrance. It can never lose its sense of a meaning that once unfolded by surprise as it went."

'The Writer's Chapbook'

"The purpose of fiction is to help us answer the questions we must constantly be asking ourselves: who do we think we are and what do we think we're doing?"

Robert Stone 

Janet Frame

"The thing which prompts you to sit down to write must be something which haunts you."

Why Writers Write

"There has to be an irritation that makes you want to cry out. All fiction is, in a funny way, protest fiction."

John Updike