Louis Dudek quotes:

In a poem, the words happen; they just come. I let them. Otherwise, I wouldn't write. To interfere with what is happening is to distort the poem. Just a very small degree of intelligence and supervision is necessary. Very tactful. Any revision later that violates the text as it came, that begins rewriting the words, is fake.

The philistine provides the best definition of art. Anything that makes him rage is first class.

Art is anything people do with distinction.

The residue of religion in my work appears as a modified transcendentalism, and the positivist scientific side of my thought appears as concreteness and realism. The effort to reconcile the two is at the core of all my poetry.

Canada is a country where the serious writers are hockey fans and readers of comic books. They don't play chess.

The long poem cannot be a digressive, expansive, boring exposition. It is really made of very sharp, Imagistic, quintessential poetic elements.

There are two kinds of people; those who are always well and those who are always sick. Most of the evils of the world come from the first sort and most of the achievement from the second.

Hatred isgeneralized, but love is for the particular.

Intellectually, most people never wash. They never free their minds of the accumulated rubbish of centuries.

Reason to rule, mercy to forgive: The first is law, the last prerogative.

The twentieth century had a wonderful capacity for seeing nothing as the sum of everything.

There is no original sin. It's all been done before.

A good reputation is better than fame.

What is forgiven is usually well remembered.

A critic at best is a waiter at the great table of literature.

All the ills of mankind spring from belonging to a race, a nation, a city, a group of some kind. The ideal would be to belong to none, and to care for allbut who is capable of that?

Imagination should be integrated with life, not turned into a separate activity, art, that monopolizes one's whole existence.

The best live among us in disguise.