James Broughton Quotations

If bitterness wants to get into the act, I offer it a cookie or a gumdrop.

I'm happy to report that my inner child is still ageless.

Trusting your individual uniqueness challenges you to lay yourself open.

I tried to stir the imagination and enthusiasms of students to take risks, to do what they were most afraid of doing, to widen their horizons of action.

If you don't fill your days with love, you are wasting your life.

Some artists shrink from self-awareness, fearing that it will destroy their unique gifts and even their desire to create. The truth of the matter is quite opposite.

And to Shakespeare I owe my vision of the world as a theater, wherein all humans are acting out their parts.

Poetry for me is as much a spiritual practice as sexual ecstasy is.

The most astonishing joy is to receive from the muses the gift of a whole lyric.

The quietest poetry can be an explosion of joy.

My films are an extension of my poetry, using the white screen like the white page to be filled with images.

I like things which appear fragile but are tough inside.

Most poets in their youth begin in adolescent sadness. I find it more rewarding to end in gladness.

The only limits are, as always, those of vision.

A born poet knows in his cradle that a poetic life is the only life worth living.

Dance, vaudeville, drama, movies - as a child I loved everything that went on in a theater.

Everything that ever happened is still happening. Past, present and future keep happening in the eternity which is Here and Now.

I never wanted to dilute my private passion for the art by airing and arguing it in public.

I often start writing in order to excite an expansive emotion.

Work in the theater sharpened my verse and my cinema.

I consider my films to be poems that are all as personal as my writing and as hand-made.

The American public does not know poets exist.

Today the U.S. is farther from being nourished by poetry than it was a hundred years ago, when books of poems were best-sellers.

Rarest of the real poets are born poets. They are the oddballs, not the professors.

Ultimately I have learned more about poetry, from music and magic than from literature.

My earliest poems sing of the absolute necessity of allowing love to invade and pervade one's life. That can make the miracle happen in reality. Try it.

Acclaim is a distraction.

Adversity is a stimulus.

I had a toy theater and a magic lantern, and when I was eight I built a stage for theatricals in the attic.

For me, prose walks, poetry dances.

Amazement awaits us at every corner.

Life's major challenge: getting reborn often enough.

We are all participants in the marvelous.

In the world of poetry there are would-be poets, workshop poets, promising poets, lovesick poets, university poets, and a few real poets.

For me a poem has to sing out of itself and the lilt of it carries the magic.

You're closer to your glory leaping an abyss than re-upholstering a rut.

Most poets, like most people, try hard to be like someone they admire or they are possessed with an image of what they ought to be.

Being identified as a poet in France or Denmark or India one is greeted with gracious respect.

My major aim in writing is to set out flags and issue wake-up calls.

Consciousness is the glory of creation.

True delicacy is not a fragile thing.

Everything is Song. Everything is Silence. Since it all turns out to be illusion, perfectly being what it is, having nothing to do with good or bad, you are free to die laughing.

It was as important to live poetically as to write poems.

Life is adventure, not predicament.

At every crossroad, be prepared to bump into wonder.

Follow your own weird.