Explore Quotes by Wislawa Szymborska

'There's nothing new under the sun': that's what you wrote, Ecclesiastes. But you yourself were born new under the sun.

I don't believe I have a mission. Sometimes I really have a spiritual need to say something more general about the world, and sometimes something personal.

Someone sits at a table or lies on a sofa while staring motionless at a wall or ceiling. Once in a while this person writes down seven lines, only to cross out one of them 15 minutes later, and then another hour passes, during which nothing happens. Who could stand to watch this kind of thing?

Each of us has a very rich nature and can look at things objectively, from a distance, and at the same time can have something more personal to say about them. I am trying to look at the world, and at myself, from many different points of view. I think many poets have this duality.

I cannot speak for more than an hour exclusively about poetry. At that point, life itself takes over again.

When I was young I had a moment of believing in the Communist doctrine. I wanted to save the world through Communism. Quite soon I understood that it doesn't work, but I've never pretended it didn't happen to me.

Sometimes I really have a spiritual need to say something more general about the world, and sometimes something personal.

You know, I'm worried about Szymborska. I wish she would stop smoking.

Poets yearn, of course, to be published, read, and understood, but they do little, if anything, to set themselves above the common herd and the daily grind.

I started earning a living as a poet rather early on.

I'm fighting against the bad poet who is prone to using too many words.

Solitude is very important in my work as a mode of inspiration, but isolation is not good in this respect. I am not writing poetry about isolation.

Unfortunately, poetry is not born in noise, in crowds, or on a bus. There have to be four walls and the certainty that the telephone will not ring. That's what writing is all about.

All imperfection is easier to tolerate if served up in small doses.

Keep up the good work, if only for a while, if only for the twinkling of a tiny galaxy.

You can find the entire cosmos lurking in its least remarkable objects.

You have to remember all the time that there is a comical side to everything.

I usually write for the individual reader -though I would like to have many such readers. There are some poets who write for people assembled in big rooms, so they can live through something collectively. I prefer my reader to take my poem and have a one-on-one relationship with it.

I cannot imagine any writer who would not fight for his peace and quiet.

Get to know other worlds, if only for comparison. I am near, too near for him to dream of me.

Take it not amiss, O speech, that I borrow weighty words, and later try hard to make them seem light.