Philip Schultz Quotations

As a poet and a teacher, I read all the time. I know I read slowly. I like reading, but I don't read any more than I have to.

I know it sounds strange to say, but the very technologies that have made traveling easier for most people - GPS, automated ticket machines, online schedules and ticketing, boarding passes you can print out at home - have actually made things harder for me.

I come from a family of Russian immigrant Jews who were all big storytellers, who would get together, and one would try to top the others' stories, and stories would get bigger and bigger. And the lying aspect, the exaggeration, would get large.

Failure has been the great theme of my life, I think.

I didn't learn how to read until I was at the end of fifth grade and 11 years old and held back.

I never doubted my talent. If talent was the circus, then I was its ringmaster and audience, applauding its every move.

Letter scrambling and trouble reading is just a small part of dyslexia. It is also an auditory processing problem.

Most people try to avoid cliches. It's my ambition in life to try to get 'em right!

Suddenly, everyone wanted to talk to me, it seemed. And not about my poetry: it was my dyslexia they were most interested in.

Suddenly, I was reading these comics. I was looking at those bubbles, those dialogue bubbles, and suddenly there were words... recognizable words.

The word 'novel' carries, for me, a weight as ominous, all-consuming and unforgiving as any Job encountered.

What I read, I read thoroughly and retain almost all of it.

Art's power of persuasion resides in the small personal details of one's own story, and if it weren't for my struggle with dyslexia, I doubt I'd ever have become a writer or known how to teach others to write.

Being a poet, the advantages of dyslexia are many, affording me sensitivity to the musical nuances of language and the ability to juggle complicated ideas and narratives simultaneously.

Dyslexia lends itself to original thinking, not rote formulas, because you can't do the formulas - you think up your own method based on intuition and instincts. Creativity is trial and error, trying to figure out a way to do something emotionally and intuitively.

I can't remember a time when I stepped into an airport or train station without wishing I were somewhere else, doing almost anything else. Just thinking about traveling gives me the willies. Traveling and dyslexia don't really get along.

I do think that there is a profound reservoir of creativity and imagination in everyone I've ever met, and sometimes if someone is persistent and perversely obstinate enough to persevere, then they want to be helped. There is a way to help them.

I don't think I've worked with anyone where I haven't seen some progress. Now sometimes you can't take someone where they want to go, not all the way, and sometimes you stop, and they do it or don't do it on their own thereafter.

I eventually just imagined being a little boy who was quote unquote 'normal': who could learn like all the kids around me that I felt excluded from. And I imagined myself into one of these and into someone who could read.

I found many ways around my dyslexia, but I still have trouble transforming words into sounds. I have to memorize and rehearse before reading anything aloud to avoid embarrassing myself by mispronouncing words.

I have to often read the same sentence over and over before I understand it. And I have to convince myself that what I'm reading is so enjoyable and so exciting and so good for me that it's worth the effort.

I never feel more alone than when I'm traveling. Alone and, to some extent, helpless. The world expects a certain level of competence and can be merciless when this expectation is unmet.

I not only couldn't read but often couldn't hear or understand what was being said to me - by the time I'd processed the beginning of a sentence, the teacher was well on her way through a second or third.

I think I was 16 when I had the thought of maybe being a writer. And this is complicated, something I only now understand, because when I was young, having dyslexia and not knowing it made reading such an ordeal.

I think one's relationship with one's vulnerability is a very delicate and precious relationship. Most people try to hide, disguise that vulnerability, and in doing that, you, I think, diminish a great source of power.

I was 17 when I decided to write stories as big as cathedrals, overflowing with the kind of memorable and audacious characters Walker Percy, Ernest Hemingway and Saul Bellow created.

With my fiction, I focused on chapters and overall conceptions, while in poetry, I crawled along in the trenches of each sentence, examining every word for a sign of a deeper significance.

My imagination was a great place to escape from all the anxiety and disapproval of my life... I had to live in my head... art was a way of making myself feel better.

I'm a painfully slow reader. And to this day, I mean, I love reading, and I'm very careful - very selective about what I read because I don't read very fast and, therefore, not a great deal.

There is a gap in my work from '84 to 2002, 18 years where I stopped writing. I was working at fiction and other things and starting a school and getting married and starting a family, but I wasn't writing poetry for the better part of 15 years.

I was well into middle age when one of my children, then in the second grade, was found to be dyslexic. I had never known the name for it, but I recognized immediately that the symptoms were also mine.

I write slowly, and I write many, many drafts. I probably have to work as hard as anyone, and maybe harder, to finish a poem. I often write a poem over years, because it takes me a long time to figure out what to say and how best to say it.

Repeating third grade at a new school, after having been asked to leave my old one for hitting kids who made fun of my perceived stupidity, I was placed in the 'dummy class.'

When a child knows that he or she is dyslexic, that it's the way their brain is programmed, and it's not their fault, that makes all the difference in the world.

If I get the idea, and I get some clarity on how I feel about that idea, then I can safely assume I'll find the right words. I do have that confidence.

I'd grown accustomed to seeing myself as someone who, if fallible and unworthy, had nevertheless managed to do one thing well enough to get recognition for it.

Art is a crime scene in a sense, a crucible, of the mind and heart and our dreams.

My father's death when I was eighteen and his struggles as a Jewish immigrant provided me with the raw material, but for a long time I went from painting to fiction and then finally to poetry before I could find the right way of telling this story.

I wrote poetry in a secretive way, I think, a secret from myself, I mean. I wrote it because it gave me great pleasure to do so and because it relieved the ever-building pressure of the demanding world around me. It's always served me as a way of appraising, and controlling overwhelming experiences. But this need, and desire, was always in conflict with my need to "survive."

Happiness is a powerful thing. It freed me to do what I always wanted to do.

I'm the kind of father I wanted my father to be. That may be the sweetest revenge.

My first sense of myself was as an artist, a painter. I would see a Van Gogh painting and just love it, the more emotional and passionate the more it attracted me.

There are real facts in my poems, but facts mixed up in the perverse stubborn stew of imagination, add a pinch or two of revenge and retribution, a dash of amplification and reparation.

My poems often start with an idea, some kind of inspiration. I don't expect anything. Every now and then something like "The One Truth" comes out.

Every artist has his or her struggle to work out in their work. The more powerful the struggle, the more persuasive the art.

Emotional truth is the reward of digging deeply enough to find the truth about how one really feels, but in order to convey this truth with any force, or artistry, one needs to 'create' a form of expression, and this form determines its own "genuine information".

To pay for my father's funeral I borrowed money from people he already owed money to. One called him a nobody. No, I said, he was a failure. You can't remember a nobody's name, that's why they're called nobodies. Failures are unforgettable.