Quotes by Peter Porter

As to whether the people who were supposedly to put up the money and did put it up or whether it was Arthur's own money is something which I shall never know.

He suggested Job, but I said no. I couldn't possibly do Job, not only because The Book of Job itself is remarkable and so peculiar in the original biblical text, but after Blake had really made almost impoosible to do Job, I mean Blake had finished Job off for good.

I can always get examples from music than I can from illustrative art, if you take an opera which is about Ancient Greece or an opera which is set in sort of Italy or Spain about an amoreuse, Mozart style will be the same for both. You don't have an archaic Greek style for an archaic story and have a sort of sexy, you know, Italian style for a sexy Italian story. The artist has his own style.

I have no fondness for pure form at all.

I mean, one of the great problems of the 20th century has been that the poets recognising that there's a lack of seriouness in the world and turned themselves to a certain degree, to be stand up comedians, even the best of them. Now in the 60's and the 70's in England anyway, I'm not sure about Australia and America, the poet as a stand up comedian became practically, the sort of style of the time.

I started off in England and very few people knew I was Australian. I mean, the clues were in the poems, but they didn't read them very carefully, and so for years and years I was considered completely part of the English poetry scene.

I wanted to take a stand against what I think was not so well established then but is thoroughly well established now, which is the substitution for a real sense of a country of a hideous distortion which you can sell to the people called 'heritage'.

In other words the pictures are in a kind of relationship with each other which is touching only at points rather than pictures being illustrations of poems or poems extrapolations of the pictures.

It's a very obviously a picture booky story; at the same time, it's very interesting because it is a story of the obsessional nastiness of God; the Jewish God , or the Christian God, whichever God you liked to deal with.

Love without sex is still the most efficient form of hell known to man.

Once a thing's painted it's calm, and I thought, even if it shows a massacre of the innocents, the blade is still lifted, the blood isn't on the floor. I'd been particularly struck by this ridiculous little saint in San Gemignano who lay down on a plank aged fifteen and never got off it again, the saint of the town. And I thought, one's own body, one hopes, will be as calm as possible, and that's the calm country we actually live in rather than the other country.

The Natural world, in fact, enters us and becomes ,well, becomes really a kind of life, it has a pilgrimage through us.

You can never tell when an artist really will take up someone's work and work with it happily.