Best 12 quotes of Selima Hill on MyQuotes

All I do and say and think 'as a poet' is much truer and more intimate than anything I say face to face.

An audience sabotages my freedom, devastates my innocence, corrupts my integrity, inhibits my great joy - and of course gives me further to fall.

Being a poet is like having an invisible partner. It isn't easy. But you can't live without it either. Talent is only 10 per cent. The rest is obsession.

I feel much safer faced with a blank sheet of paper than I do with a real person.

If I knew how to say it directly, I would not need to write poetry. I would just talk to people and be happy.

I like to think that I'm giving a voice to the silenced.

I'm not so sure that the value of art is all it is cracked up to be.

I step naked into the shower of truth - whole-hearted, bloody-minded, utterly selfish, no longer even pretending to enjoy or understand anything.

There's the space that you soar into, the space that you sometimes break through to, and hang in. A sort of gasp or gap.

The very things I used to be told off for - daydreaming, exaggerating, making mistakes, wild guessing, contradicting, spying, being obsessive, being reckless - for these, suddenly, I am being praised.

What am I writing for anyway? Is it like dreaming? Is it a benevolent process? Something that moves the past forward? And what about those people who say all you get from looking at the past is a stiff neck?

When I was first published it was like having people rushing in coming to find out where I was hiding. Scary!