Quotes by James Fenton

“The lullaby is the spell whereby the mother attempts to transform herself back from an ogre to a saint.”

“Saigon was an addicted city, and we were the drug: the corruption of children, the mutilation of young men, the prostitution of women, the humiliation of the old, the division of the family, the division of the country-it had all been done in our name... The French city... had represented the opium stage of the addiction. With the Americans had begun the heroin phase.”

“The writing of a poem is like a child throwing stones into a mineshaft. You compose first, then you listen for the reverberation.”

“It has to be displayed, this face, on a more or less horizontal plane. Imagine a man wearing a mask, and imagine that the elastic which holds the mask on has just broken, so that the man (rather than let the mask slip off) has to tilt his head back and balance the mask on his real face. This is the kind of tyranny which Lawsons face exerts over the rest of his body as he cruises along the corridors. He doesnt look down his nose at you, he looks along his nose.”

“Imitation, if it is not forgery, is a fine thing. It stems from a generous impulse, and a realistic sense of what can and cannot be done.”

“One does not become a guru by accident.”

“When Mr Ackroyd says that in the 18th century, stranglers bit off the noses of their victims, I feel that he probably knows what he is talking about. I just wish he hadnt told me.”

“Those who actually set out to see the fall of a city or those who choose to go to a front line, are obviously asking themselves to what extent they are cowards. But the tests they set themselves / there is a dead body, can you bear to look at it? / are nothing in comparison with the tests that are sprung on them. It is not the obvious tests that matter (do you go to pieces in a mortar attack?) but the unexpected ones (here is a man on the run, seeking your help / can you face him honestly?).”

God, A Poem I didnt exist at Creation, I didnt exist at the Flood, And I wont be around for SalvationTo sort out the sheep from the cud-Or whatever the phrase is. The fact isIn soteriological termsIm a crude existential malpracticeAnd you are a diet of worms

It is not what they built. It is what they knocked down.It is not the houses. It is the spaces between the houses.It is not the streets that exist. It is the streets that no longer exist.

The great cause of the new Republican intake is the reduction of the deficit but to anyone seeking evidence of sincere attempts at deficit-reduction the evidence is baffling. The Republicans showed before Christmas that they would seek to reduce the deficit but not when it came to a matter of the tax breaks that had aggravated the deficit in the first place.Now theres a date set for the abolition of Barack Obamas healthcare plan, parts of which only came into operation at the start of this month. The Republicans are out to destroy the plan. Or, more precisely, to pretend to destroy the plan in the name of making good on election pledges. The measure wont get past the Senate.But suppose it did get past the Senate, what effect would this have on the deficit? The answer is it would aggravate the deficit. Somehow, somewhere, theres an override mechanism that makes destroying Obamacare more important than destroying the deficit. If only one could figure out how it works.

The IdealThis is where I came from.I passed this way.This should not be shameful Or hard to say.A self is a self. It is not a screen. A person should respectWhat he has been. This is my past Which I shall not discard. This is the ideal.This is hard.

The MistakeWith the mistake your life goes in reverse.Now you can see exactly what you didWrong yesterday and wrong the day beforeAnd each mistake leads back to something worseAnd every nuance of your hypocrisyTowards yourself, and every excuseStands solidly on the perspective linesAnd there is perfect visibility.What an enlightenment. The colonnadeRolls past on either side. You neednt move.The statues of your errors brush your sleeve.You watch the tale turn back — and youre dismayed.And this dismay at this, this big mistakeIs made worse by the sight of all those whoKnew all along where these mistakes would lead — Those frozen friends who watched the crisis

An aria in an opera - Handels Ombra mai fu, for example - gets along with an incredibly small number of words and ideas and a large amount of variation and repetition. Thats the beauty of it. Its not taxing to the listeners intelligence because if you havent heard it the first time round, itll come around again.

Poetry carries its history within it, and it is oral in origin. Its transmission was oral. Its transmission today is still in part oral, because we become acquainted with poetry through nursery rhymes, which we hear before we can read.

Poetry carries its history within it, and it is oral in origin. Its transmission was oral.

Modernism in other arts brought extreme difficulty. In poetry, the characteristic difficulty imported under the name of modernism was obscurity. But obscurity could just as easily be a quality of metrical as of free verse.

My feeling is that poetry will wither on the vine if you dont regularly come back to the simplest fundamentals of the poem: rhythm, rhyme, simple subjects - love, death, war.

Lyric poetry is, of course, musical in origin. I do know that what happened to poetry in the twentieth century was that it began to be written for the page. When its a question of typography, why not? Poets have done beautiful things with typography - Apollinaires Calligrammes, that sort of thing.

English poetry begins whenever we decide to say the modern English language begins, and it extends as far as we decide to say that the English language extends.