National Book Award Acceptance Speech (1957)
Context: When a poet is being a poet — that is, when he is writing or thinking about writing — he cannot be concerned with anything but the making of a poem. If the poem is to turn out well, the poet cannot have thought of whether it will be saleable, or of what its effect on the world should be; he cannot think of whether it will bring him honor, or advance a cause, or comfort someone in sorrow. All such considerations, whether silly or generous, would be merely intrusive; for, psychologically speaking, the end of writing is the poem itself.
“He's probably their battle poet, too."
"You mean he makes up heroic songs about famous battles?"
"No, no. He recites poems that frighten the enemy…. When a well-trained gonnagle starts to recite, the enemy's ears explode.”
Source: The Wee Free Men
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Terry Pratchett 796
English author 1948–2015Related quotes
“You can discover what your enemy fears most by observing the means he uses to frighten you.”
Section 222
The Passionate State Of Mind, and Other Aphorisms (1955)
“No battle plan survives first contact with the enemy. Not when the enemy is me.”
This includes a common paraphrase of a statement which originates with military strategist Field Marshall Helmuth von Moltke: "No plan of operations extends with any certainty beyond the first contact with the main hostile force."
Vorkosigan Saga, Cetaganda (1996)
“Nobody will ever win the battle of the sexes. There is too much fraternizing with the enemy.”
“He who would write heroic poems should make his whole life a heroic poem.”
Life of Schiller.
1820s, Critical and Miscellaneous Essays (1827–1855)
Sjálfstætt fólk (Independent People) (1935), Book One, Part I: Icelandic Pioneers
Of her husband, the Russian poet Sergei Yesenin, as quoted in A Century of Sundays : 100 years of Breaking News in the Sunday Papers (2006) by Nadine Dreyer, p. 65.