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John Ashbery Quotes

1927–2017 United States

John Lawrence Ashbery (–) was an award-winning American poet and a prominent art critic. Educated at Harvard and Columbia, he published 26 volumes of poetry spanning 60 years and won nearly every major American award for poetry, including a Pulitzer in 1976 and the Bollingen and Lenore Marshall prizes in 1984 for the collections Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror and A Wave, respectively.

United States
Academics
Poets

Also known as: Ashbery, John

Random John Ashbery quote

5 quotes

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

Did I say that? One says so many things, and the problem is they all get written down.

These two guys in the front yard—
Are they here to help?

April Galleons (1987)

The summer demands and takes away too much.
But night, the reserved, the reticent, gives more than it takes.

When I originally started writing, I expected that probably very few people would read my poetry because in those days people didn’t read poetry much anyway.

The Paris Review (1983)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: John Ashbery (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.