Charles Simic

“I'm a happy pessimist.”

“Inside my empty bottle I was constructing a lighthouse while all the others were making ships.”

“Poetry is an orphan of silence. The words never quite equal the experience behind them.”

“In the end, I'm a poet who's interested in the human condition.”

“Whoever invented the fork, he was a genius.”

“My poetry is unwilling to be 'about' something.”

“Insomnia is my private country.”

“Humor is the only way to stay sane.”

“What is the soul? It's like electricity - we don't really know what it is, but it's a force that can light a room.”

“The secret of poetry is cruelty.”

“My mother was a genius. She could peel an apple in one long strip.”

“We are all bit players in a tragedy of unimaginable proportions.”

“The ideal reader of my poems is someone who is not a professional reader of poems.”

“A poem is a piece of language that has a soul.”

“Poetry tries to bridge the abyss between the name and the thing.”

“Every grand theory is a myth.”

“History is a puppet show of ghosts.”