“Poetry is what happens when nothing else can.”

— Charles Bukowski

Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Poetry is what happens when nothing else can." by Charles Bukowski?

Charles Bukowski 555

American writer 1920–1994

Related quotes

“The best poetry will be found to have a power of forming, sustaining, and delighting us, as nothing else can.”

Matthew Arnold (1822–1888) English poet and cultural critic who worked as an inspector of schools

The Study of Poetry
Essays in Criticism, second series (1888)

“Nonintervention does not mean that nothing happens. It means that something else happens.”

Christopher Hitchens (1949–2011) British American author and journalist

Source: The Quotable Hitchens from Alcohol to Zionism: The Very Best of Christopher Hitchens

“Even when nothing happens, everything seems too much for me. What can be said, then, in the presence of an event, any event?”

Emil M. Cioran (1911–1995) Romanian philosopher and essayist

Drawn and Quartered (1983)

“A poet's autobiography is his poetry. Anything else can be only a footnote.”

Yevgeny Yevtushenko (1932–2017) Russian poet, film director, teacher

Andrew R. MacAndrew (trans.) A Precocious Autobiography (1963; repr. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965) p. 7.

“You can only see what you believe—nothing else is possible.”

Byron Katie (1942) American spiritual writer

Loving What Is: Four Questions That Can Change Your Life (2002)

“Steampunk is nothing more than what happens when Goths discover brown.”

Charles Stross (1964) British science fiction writer and blogger

“Well, here you get to be a writer when there's absolutely nothing else you can do.”

Nelson Algren (1909–1981) American novelist, short story writer

"The Art of Fiction No. 11" (1955)
Context: I don't think the isolation of the American writer is a tradition; it's more that geographically he just is isolated, unless he happens to live in New York City. But I don't suppose there's a small town around the country that doesn't have a writer. The thing is that here you get to be a writer differently. I mean, a writer like Sartre decides, like any professional man, when he's fifteen, sixteen years old, that instead of being a doctor he's going to be a writer. And he absorbs the French tradition and proceeds from there. Well, here you get to be a writer when there's absolutely nothing else you can do. I mean, I don't know of any writers here who just started out to be writers, and then became writers. They just happen to fall into it.