Selima Hill Quotes

There's the space that you soar into, the space that you sometimes break through to, and hang in. A sort of gasp or gap.

If I knew how to say it directly, I would not need to write poetry. I would just talk to people and be happy.

I step naked into the shower of truth - whole-hearted, bloody-minded, utterly selfish, no longer even pretending to enjoy or understand anything.

All I do and say and think 'as a poet' is much truer and more intimate than anything I say face to face.

I like to think that I'm giving a voice to the silenced.

I feel much safer faced with a blank sheet of paper than I do with a real person.

An audience sabotages my freedom, devastates my innocence, corrupts my integrity, inhibits my great joy - and of course gives me further to fall.

Poetry is a big space and I love it.

When I was first published it was like having people rushing in coming to find out where I was hiding. Scary!

The very things I used to be told off for - daydreaming, exaggerating, making mistakes, wild guessing, contradicting, spying, being obsessive, being reckless - for these, suddenly, I am being praised.

Being a poet is like having an invisible partner. It isn't easy. But you can't live without it either. Talent is only 10 per cent. The rest is obsession.

I'm not so sure that the value of art is all it is cracked up to be.

What am I writing for anyway? Is it like dreaming? Is it a benevolent process? Something that moves the past forward? And what about those people who say all you get from looking at the past is a stiff neck?