Philip Schultz Quotes

Failure has been the great theme of my life, I think.

I don't think I've worked with anyone where I haven't seen some progress. Now sometimes you can't take someone where they want to go, not all the way, and sometimes you stop, and they do it or don't do it on their own thereafter.

I could take a walk with my wife and try
to explain the ghosts I can't stop speaking to.
Or I could read all those books piling up
about the beginning of the end of understanding ...
Meanwhile, it's such a beautiful morning,
the changing colors, the hypnotic light.
I could sit by the window watching the leaves,
which seem to know exactly how to fall
from one moment to the next. Or I could lose
everything and have to begin over again.

Upstairs when someone for any reason is unable to state his particular reasons for existing, or stake a position, say, on the United States vs. Vietnam youthful enthusiasm vs. boredom scathing denunciation vs. racist exploitation the dollar-for-dollar precipitous decline of all sympathy and mercy . . . someone else gives up seeking the difference between things that could've been and weren't and things that didn't have to be but were.

Ask about these numbers and you hear other numbers. As usual, the fate of the poor hangs upon the decision of those concerned only with what those above them think. An endless cycle of egotism, self-sympathy. You see it everywhere here, those too weak and ashamed to defend themselves are blamed for their own misfortune. Separated and debased, they're swept deeper under society's carpet, thus the richest society in the history of the world lacks the will and conscience to end poverty while the poor become the victims of their own spiritual and physical misery . . ." In other words, according to Swigge, our job is to hide from the public's view the suffering and helplessness of the constituents of our largest minority, and thereby further diminish them in their eyes and in ours.

I'd grown accustomed to seeing myself as someone who, if fallible and unworthy, had nevertheless managed to do one thing well enough to get recognition for it.

I wrote poetry in a secretive way, I think, a secret from myself, I mean. I wrote it because it gave me great pleasure to do so and because it relieved the ever-building pressure of the demanding world around me. It's always served me as a way of appraising, and controlling overwhelming experiences. But this need, and desire, was always in conflict with my need to "survive."

I come from a family of Russian immigrant Jews who were all big storytellers, who would get together, and one would try to top the others' stories, and stories would get bigger and bigger. And the lying aspect, the exaggeration, would get large.

Art is a crime scene in a sense, a crucible, of the mind and heart and our dreams.

I didn't learn how to read until I was at the end of fifth grade and 11 years old and held back.

I never doubted my talent. If talent was the circus, then I was its ringmaster and audience, applauding its every move.

I'm a painfully slow reader. And to this day, I mean, I love reading, and I'm very careful - very selective about what I read because I don't read very fast and, therefore, not a great deal.

Every artist has his or her struggle to work out in their work. The more powerful the struggle, the more persuasive the art.

. . . once on a German radio in the town square we heard Hitler's voice, everyone German soldiers our neighbors smiling at the crazy screaming, a sound like fingernails on a blackboard trying to scrape God's face from our minds . . . conquer our souls as well as our bodies and minds . . . Henryk looked so frightened - a wolf's howls demanding we see the world the way it did . . .

Not one of the three black deaf-mutes who come here every day owns a dog. They sit under the fragrant decay of the big mossy oak speaking with their eyes and hands. They love dogs so much they vibrate, but, like me, they can't bear to own one. Anyone who's ever owned one knows what owning love means.

I think one's relationship with one's vulnerability is a very delicate and precious relationship. Most people try to hide, disguise that vulnerability, and in doing that, you, I think, diminish a great source of power.

I can't remember a time when I stepped into an airport or train station without wishing I were somewhere else, doing almost anything else. Just thinking about traveling gives me the willies. Traveling and dyslexia don't really get along.

I'm the kind of father I wanted my father to be. That may be the sweetest revenge.

Suddenly, everyone wanted to talk to me, it seemed. And not about my poetry: it was my dyslexia they were most interested in.

My first sense of myself was as an artist, a painter. I would see a Van Gogh painting and just love it, the more emotional and passionate the more it attracted me.

I was 17 when I decided to write stories as big as cathedrals, overflowing with the kind of memorable and audacious characters Walker Percy, Ernest Hemingway and Saul Bellow created.

I found many ways around my dyslexia, but I still have trouble transforming words into sounds. I have to memorize and rehearse before reading anything aloud to avoid embarrassing myself by mispronouncing words.

The word 'novel' carries, for me, a weight as ominous, all-consuming and unforgiving as any Job encountered.

When I was last in Paris I was dirt poor, hiding from the Vietnam War. One night, in an old church, I considered taking my life. I didn't know how to be so young and not belong anywhere, stuck among so many perplexing melodies.

I write slowly, and I write many, many drafts. I probably have to work as hard as anyone, and maybe harder, to finish a poem. I often write a poem over years, because it takes me a long time to figure out what to say and how best to say it.

Happiness is a powerful thing. It freed me to do what I always wanted to do.

What I read, I read thoroughly and retain almost all of it.

There are real facts in my poems, but facts mixed up in the perverse stubborn stew of imagination, add a pinch or two of revenge and retribution, a dash of amplification and reparation.

With my fiction, I focused on chapters and overall conceptions, while in poetry, I crawled along in the trenches of each sentence, examining every word for a sign of a deeper significance.

Art's power of persuasion resides in the small personal details of one's own story, and if it weren't for my struggle with dyslexia, I doubt I'd ever have become a writer or known how to teach others to write.

Emotional truth is the reward of digging deeply enough to find the truth about how one really feels, but in order to convey this truth with any force, or artistry, one needs to 'create' a form of expression, and this form determines its own "genuine information".

I think I was 16 when I had the thought of maybe being a writer. And this is complicated, something I only now understand, because when I was young, having dyslexia and not knowing it made reading such an ordeal.

I have to often read the same sentence over and over before I understand it. And I have to convince myself that what I'm reading is so enjoyable and so exciting and so good for me that it's worth the effort.

My father's death when I was eighteen and his struggles as a Jewish immigrant provided me with the raw material, but for a long time I went from painting to fiction and then finally to poetry before I could find the right way of telling this story.

Most people try to avoid cliches. It's my ambition in life to try to get 'em right!

None though as bowed, small-boned, as my own peasant legs, which in their backward sway and inward turn, shaped by years of adherence to hostile terrains, possess a history of staying put.

Repeating third grade at a new school, after having been asked to leave my old one for hitting kids who made fun of my perceived stupidity, I was placed in the 'dummy class.'

Dyslexia lends itself to original thinking, not rote formulas, because you can't do the formulas - you think up your own method based on intuition and instincts. Creativity is trial and error, trying to figure out a way to do something emotionally and intuitively.

These guys get mean waiting on furloughs, beat the machines up good, insurance replaces three batches a month, but destroying machines aint booze and pussy if you know what I mean.

I never feel more alone than when I'm traveling. Alone and, to some extent, helpless. The world expects a certain level of competence and can be merciless when this expectation is unmet.

I eventually just imagined being a little boy who was quote unquote 'normal': who could learn like all the kids around me that I felt excluded from. And I imagined myself into one of these and into someone who could read.

I know it sounds strange to say, but the very technologies that have made traveling easier for most people - GPS, automated ticket machines, online schedules and ticketing, boarding passes you can print out at home - have actually made things harder for me.

To pay for my father's funeral I borrowed money from people he already owed money to. One called him a nobody. No, I said, he was a failure. You can't remember a nobody's name, that's why they're called nobodies. Failures are unforgettable.

Harrington never worked in a place like this, a system where 'underbudgeting' is designed to arbitrarily keep costs down while acting as a defense against public attack. The city and state thus appear magnanimous, politicians fair-minded regulators of the public good . . . until the closed cases lead to starvation, child abuse and suicides at rates so great they arouse the public's conscience. Then it all starts again - bigger budgets, closer supervision, more MSW programs . . . while the poor are blamed because according to our Puritan tradition of self-reliance those too weak or stupid to contribute get pushed aside, deserve not to survive

Usually our frankfurter lunches in Union Square Park are a treat, but today Betty isn't looking at me, saying, "I came out here thinking maybe being so far away would make me feel less inconsequential, but I was wrong. Evil doesn't keep score." Today the world is more treacherous, and no longer represented by actual or possible thought, which Ludwig said makes up the whole of reality.