It might be a bad thing, not to know what’s going on in the world. I can’t say I really approve of it.

About Sharon Olds

Sharon Oldsis an American poet. Olds won the first San Francisco Poetry Center Award in 1980, the 1984 National Book Critics Circle Award, and the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.

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More quotes from Sharon Olds

Well, one thing I’m really interested in, when I’m writing, is being accurate.

Sharon Olds

American poet and academic

My poems – I don’t even like the sound of that, in a way. Not that anyone else wrote them. But we know that only people who are really close to us care about our personal experience.

Sharon Olds

American poet and academic

The older I get, the more I feel almost beautiful.

Sharon Olds

American poet and academic

If I wrote in a sonnet form, I would be distorting. Or if I had some great new idea for line breaks and I used it in a poem, but it’s really not right for that poem, but I wanted it, that would be distorting.

Sharon Olds

American poet and academic

It might be a bad thing, not to know what’s going on in the world. I can’t say I really approve of it.

Sharon Olds

American poet and academic

Well, “The Wellspring” was written from 1983 to 1986. And it had a section in the beginning that was poems that began from others’ experience.

Sharon Olds

American poet and academic

So I did quit coffee and I did quit smoking. But I haven’t managed that with drinking!

Sharon Olds

American poet and academic

There are some fine books and essays about that. Lewis Hyde has written about alcoholism and poets and the role that society gives its writers – encouraging them to die.

Sharon Olds

American poet and academic

I’m not sure that the benefit – as a writer and as a citizen – that I would get from reading at least the front page of the Times every day or every other day would outweigh the depression.

Sharon Olds

American poet and academic

I was very afraid that I wouldn’t be able to do this job well. And the time never came back.

Sharon Olds

American poet and academic

Their spirits and their visions are embodied in their craft. And so is mine. It’s not Jane Saw Puff. But the clarity of Jane Saw Puff is precious to me.

Sharon Olds

American poet and academic

Many poets write books. They’ll tell you: Well, I’ve got my next book, but there are two poems I need to write, one about x, one about y. This is a wonder to me.

Sharon Olds

American poet and academic

Maybe we can use a metaphor for it, out of dance. I think for many years I was aware of the need, in dance and in life, to breathe deeply and to take in more air than we usually take in.

Sharon Olds

American poet and academic

I’m probably so out of it at my age that I don’t know what people think.

Sharon Olds

American poet and academic

At one point I took on a new job, and I just didn’t have time to do anything but work.

Sharon Olds

American poet and academic

This creature of the poem may assemble itself into a being with its own centrifugal force.

Sharon Olds

American poet and academic

The amount of horror one used to hear about in one village could be quite extreme. But one might not have heard about all the other villages’ horrors at the same time.

Sharon Olds

American poet and academic

When I quit all these things and said I didn’t have any time, I meant I didn’t have any time.

Sharon Olds

American poet and academic

I think this is true for all artists. My senses are very important to me.

Sharon Olds

American poet and academic

I didn’t have time to sit down and look at the work of a year and choose what to type.

Sharon Olds

American poet and academic

The decision for me was whether to have “The Father” be a book that told a story – from the point of view of this speaker, the daughter – without, as in the earlier books, then having a section on something else and a section on something else.

Sharon Olds

American poet and academic

I wish I wrote more about the world at more distance from myself.

Sharon Olds

American poet and academic

I think that there are fiction writers for whom that works well. I could never do it. I feel as if, by the time I see that it’s a poem, it’s almost written in my head somewhere.

Sharon Olds

American poet and academic