Best 33 quotes of John Berryman on MyQuotes

Bats have no bankers and they do not drink and cannot be arrested and pay no tax and, in general, bats have it made.

Ever to confess you're bored means you have no Inner Resources.

I can offer you only: this world like a knife

I conclude now I have no inner resources, because I am heavy bored. Peoples bore me, literature bores me, especially great literature.

I cry. Evil dissolves, & love, like foam; that love. Prattle of children powers me home, my heart claps like the swan's under a frenzy of who love me & who shine.

I didn't want to be like Yeats; I wanted to be Yeats.

I do strongly feel that among the greatest pieces of luck for high achievement is ordeal. Certain great artists can make out without it, Titian and others, but mostly you need ordeal. My idea is this: the artist is extremely lucky who is presented with the worst possible ordeal which will not actually kill him. At that point, he's in business: Beethoven's deafness, Goya's deafness, Milton's blindness, that kind of thing.

I think that what happens in my poetic work in the future will depend on my being knocked in the face, and thrown flat, and given cancer, and all kinds of other things short of senile dementia.

Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so. After all, the sky flashes, the great sea yearns, we ourselves flash and yearn, and moreover my mother told me as a boy (repeatedly) 'Ever to confess you're bored means you have no inner Resources.' I conclude now I have no inner resources, because I am heavy bored.

Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so. After all, the sky flashes, the great sea yearns, we ourselves flash and yearn

Literature bores me, especially great literature

Offering Dragons quarter is no good, they regrow all their parts and come on again. They have to be killed.

One must be ruthless with one's own writing or someone else will be.

Praise will lead you to vanity, and blame will lead you to self-pity, and both are bad for writers.

So if I were talking to a young writer, I would recommend the cultivation of extreme indifference to both praise and blame because praise will lead you to vanity, and blame will lead you to self-pity, and both are bad for writers.

something has been said for sobriety but very little.

The artist is extremely lucky who is presented with the worst possible ordeal which will not actually kill him. At that point, he's in business.

There is no such thing as Freedom (though it is the most important condition of human life, after Humility, -which does not exist either). There is only Slavery (walls around one) and absence-of-Slavery (ability to walk in any direction, or to remain still).

These Songs are not meant to be understood, you understand. They are only meant to terrify & comfort.

This world is gradually becoming a place Where I do not care to be any more.

Two daiquiris withdrew into a corner of a gorgeous room and one told the other a lie.

We are using our own skins for wallpaper and we cannot win.

Wishin' was dyin' but I gotta make it all this way to that bed on these feet.

You should always be trying to write a poem you are unable to write, a poem you lack the technique, the language, the courage to achieve. Otherwise you're merely imitating yourself, going nowhere, because that's always easiest.

During those years he met his seminars, went & lectured & read, talked with human beings, paid insurance & taxes; but his mind was not on it. his mind was elsewheres in an area where the soul not talks but sings & where foes are attacked with axes.

Goodbye, sir, & fare well. You’re in the clear.

I ask for a decree dooming my bitter enemies to laughter advanced against them.

Love her he doesn't but the thought he puts into that young woman would launch a national product complete with TV spots & skywriting outlets in Bonn & Tokyo I mean it

That baby has got to learn things including remaining erect & on deck & all, her study of herself must include no wings. She's sturdy, beautiful, & she will do, unless the universal homage turns her head as it might well do mine, hypnotized by the Little Baby...

Them lady poets must not marry, pal . . . It is a true error to marry with poets / or to be by them.

The Prayer of the Middle-Aged Man Amid the doctors in the Temple at twelve, between mother & host at Cana implored too soon, in the middle of disciples, the midst of the mob, between High-Priest and Procurator, among the occupiers, between the malefactors, and 'stetit in medio, et dixit, pax vobis' and 'ascensit ad mediam Personarum et caelorum,' dear my Lord,mercy a sinner nailed dead-centre too, pray not to late,- for also Ezra stood between the seven & the six, restoring the new Law.

They say we have weak wills. Do you know about the two drunks who went to the film of The Lost Weekend. Came out staggering. "My God I'll never take another drink," said the first. "My God I'll never go to another movie." How's that for commitment?

You come in all clammed up, defences in depth, alibi-systems long established, delusions full-blown. In order to have a chance of staying sober, or rather of staying dry and becoming sober, you've got to change. Nobody likes to change. What you really want, when you come into hospital, even for the second or third or ninth time, is to stay just who you are and not drink. That's not possible, of course. Jack-Who-Drinks has got to alter into Jack-Who-Does-Not-Drink-And-Likes-It.