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It was my sensual excessiveness that jarred him (Jasper Johns, fh). He was always an intellectual. He read a lot, he wrote poetry – he would read Hart Crane’s poems to me, which I loved but didn’t have the patience to read myself – and he was often critical of things like my grammar. But you don’t let a thing like that bother you if you have only two or three real friends.
--
Off the Wall: Robert Rauschenberg and the Art world of Our Time, Calvin Tomkins, Penguin Books, New York, 1980, p. 119

 

Robert Rauschenberg

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Thereafter, when he himself was dead, he imagined that his poems would be published in some mysterious way, and the nation would read them for comfort in adversity, as it had read the poems of other poets before him; it was his highest wish that his poems could help those as unfortunate as himself to have patience to endure.

 

Halldor Laxness

 

He (Jasper Johns, fh) and I were each other’s first serious critics. Actually he was the first painter I ever shared ideas with, or had discussions with about painting. No, not the first. Cy Twombly was the first. But Cy and I were not critical. I did my work and he did his. Cy’s direction was always so personal that you could only discuss it after the fact. But Jasper and I literally traded ideas. He would say, ‘I’ve got a terrific idea for you, ‘ and then I’d have to find one for him. (remark on his cooperative relation with Jasper Johns, to his biographer Calvin Tomkins)

 

Robert Rauschenberg

 

To understand oneself requires patience, tolerant awareness; the self is a book of many volumes which you cannot read in a day, but when once you begin to read, you must read every word, every sentence, every paragraph for in them are the intimations of the whole. The beginning of it is the ending of it. If you know how to read, supreme wisdom is to be found.

 

Jiddu Krishnamurti

 

Well, I decided that as a teenager that I really didn't know enough to describe character well and I was wasting my time. I'd learned as much as I could about story telling techniques and it wasn't a matter of technique any more. It was a matter of substance. As a result I said I was going to wait until I was a lot older and had more experience. So it was that after I got out of college I'd been away from SF for about four years. I'd read SF steadily from when I was eleven until I started college. When I started college I said, "I'm not going to read that while I'm here, I'm going to learn poetry and other things of that sort" in fact I wrote a lot of poetry then.

 

Roger Zelazny

 

A friend came over to the house
a few days ago and read one of my poems.
He came back today and asked to read the
same poem over again. After he finished
reading it, he said, "It makes me want to write poetry."

 

Richard Brautigan