James Broughton quotes:

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.

Trusting your individual uniqueness challenges you to lay yourself open.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

Amazement awaits us at every corner.

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.

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

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

True delicacy is not a fragile thing.

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

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

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

Acclaim is a distraction.

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.

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

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

Work in the theater sharpened my verse and my cinema.

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

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

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

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

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

Life is adventure, not predicament.

The quietest poetry can be an explosion of joy.

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

For me, prose walks, poetry dances.

Follow your own weird.

At every crossroad, be prepared to bump into wonder.

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

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

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

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

Adversity is a stimulus.

Consciousness is the glory of creation.

We are all participants in the marvelous.

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

I like things which appear fragile but are tough inside.

Life's major challenge: getting reborn often enough.

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