Poetry is at least an elegance and at most a revelation.

Well, with the French language, which I understood and spoke, however imperfectly, and read in great quantities, at certain times, the matter I suppose was slightly different from either Latin or Greek.

I think it was lucky that during most of the work on the Odyssey I lived on Homer's sea in houses that were, in one case, shaken by the impact of the Mediterranean winter storms on the rocks below.

In a way you can feel that the poet actually is looking over your shoulder, and you say to yourself, now, how would this go for him? Would this do or not?

Of course the other and more serious way in which it all happens is that one finds in poems and language some quality one appropriates for oneself and wishes to reproduce.

I think there are perhaps two ways in which one can begin.

Well, maybe so, although I don't think I am particularly gifted in languages. In fact, oddly enough, it may have something to do with my being slow at languages.

Yes, and there were changes of light on landscapes and changes of direction of the wind and the force of the wind and weather. That whole scene is too important in Homer to neglect.

The question is how to bring a work of imagination out of one language that was just as taken-for-granted by the persons who used it as our language is by ourselves. Nothing strange about it.

Is encouragement what the poet needs? Open question. Maybe he needs discouragement. In fact, quite a few of them need more discouragement, the most discouragement possible.

In fact, eloquence in English will inevitably make use of the Latin element in our vocabulary.

One should indeed read Pope with his notes available, in the Twickenham edition possibly, to see what a vast amount he did understand about Homer.

The heart of the matter seems to me to be the direct interaction between one's making a poem in English and a poem in the language that one understands and values. I don't see how you can do it otherwise.

I think that everyone who took part has always been grateful for it.

Homer's whole language, the language in which he lived, the language that he breathed, because he never saw it, or certainly those who formed his tradition never saw it, in characters on the pages. It was all on the tongue and in the ear.

Poetry is at least an elegance and at most a revelation.

That helped me to keep in touch with myself and to keep in touch with this really quite extraordinary language and literature into which I had pushed a little way.

The invention of Bob Dylan with his guitar belongs in its way to the same kind of tradition of something meant to be heard, as the songs of Homer.

There must of course be a relationship between translating and making poems of your own, but what it is I just don't know.

Words began to appear in English and to make some kind of equivalent. For what satisfaction it is hard to say, except that something seems unusually piercing, living, handsome, in another language, and since English is yours, you wish it to be there too.

Yes, living voices in a living language, so it seemed to us.

I would then go on to say that Homer, as we now know, was working in what they call an oral tradition.

What the translator - myself in particular - does is not comparable to what the Homeric performer was doing.

Now, the language that had grown up and formed itself on those principles is what one is dealing with, and the problem is to bring a work of art in that medium into another medium formed on different principles and heard and understood in a different way.

Is encouragement what the poet needs Open question. Maybe he needs discouragement. In fact quite a few of them need more discouragement the most discouragement possible.

The only real elegance is in the mind; if you've got that, the rest really comes from it.

Robert Walker as Bruno was excellent. He had elegance and humor, and the proper fondness for his mother.

A statesman who keeps his ear permanently glued to the ground will have neither elegance of posture nor flexibility of movement.

Isn't elegance forgetting what one is wearing?

Teach us that wealth is not elegance, that profusion is not magnificence, that splendor is not beauty.

If you are out to describe the truth, leave elegance to the tailor.

What is elegance? Soap and water!

About seven years later I was given a book about the periodic table of the elements. For the first time I saw the elegance of scientific theory and its predictive power.

The only thing I was trying to portray was serenity. Also, innocence, vulnerability and elegance.

I believe that the Apple Shuffle is an excellent compromise among the conflicting requirements of simplicity, elegance, size, battery life, and function.

Nothing surpasses the beauty and elegance of a bad idea.

I am from the planet of elegance.

Elegance is not a dispensable luxury but a factor that decides between success and failure.

If only for the sake of elegance, I try to remain morally pure.

The elegance of honesty needs no adornment.

Elegance is not the prerogative of those who have just escaped from adolescence, but of those who have already taken possession of their future.

Elegance is innate. It has nothing to do with being well dressed. Elegance is refusal.

If mathematics is to be understood widely, we need to emphasise its elegance and its applications. Sometimes it seems that universities want to emphasise how difficult it is!

What is it indeed that gives us the feeling of elegance in a solution, in a demonstration?

Why has elegance found so little following? That is the reality of it. Elegance has the disadvantage, if that's what it is, that hard work is needed to achieve it and a good education to appreciate it.

We must never confuse elegance with snobbery.

Poetry is at least an elegance and at most a revelation.

The elegance and the quality - the talent is always in the literature. I start with the word and I base everything on that. It doesn't make any difference to me.

The way in which mathematicians and physicists and historians talk is quite different, and what a physicist means by physical intuition and what a mathematician means by beauty or elegance are things worth thinking about.