Quote of the Day

Most good things are tentative, or should be if they aren’t…The artists of the world can be divided into two groups: those who organize and premeditate, and those who accept the tentative, the whatever happens along. And though neither method is inherently superior, and one must always proceed by cases, I probably prefer more works of art that fall in the latter category.

—John Ashbery, in an essay on the work of Jane Freilicher

Quote of the Day

There is the view that poetry should improve your life. I think people confuse it with the Salvation Army.

—John Ashbery

Quote of the Day

I tried each thing, only some were immortal and free.

—John Ashbery

Quote of the Day

A gag that’s probably gone unnoticed turns up in the last sentence of the novel I wrote with James Schuyler. Actually it’s my sentence. It reads: “So it was that the cliff dwellers, after bidding their cousins good night, moved off towards the parking area, while the latter bent their steps toward the partially rebuilt shopping plaza in the teeth of the freshening foehn.” Foehn is a kind of warm wind that blows in Bavaria that produces a fog. I would doubt that many people know that. I liked the idea that people, if they bothered to, would have to open the dictionary to find out what the last word in the novel meant. They’d be closing one book and opening another.

—John Ashbery, to The Paris Review