Irving Layton Quotes

16 Sourced Quotes

I am a genius who has written poems that will survive with the best of Shakespeare, Wordsworth and Keats

Irving Layton
In Pierre Elliott Trudeau, Canada has at last produced a political leader worthy of assassination.

Irving Layton
Canadians look down on the United States and consider it Hell. They are right to do so. Canada is to the United States what, in Dante's scheme, Limbo is to Hell.

Irving Layton
When you argue with your inferiors,
you convince them of only one thing:
they are as clever as you.

Irving Layton
We love in another's soul
whatever of ourselves
we can deposit in it;
the greater the deposit,
the greater the love.

Irving Layton
My neighbour
doesn't want to be loved
as much as
he wants to be envied.

Irving Layton
Since I no longer expect anything from mankind except madness, meanness, and mendacity; egotism, cowardice, and self-delusion, I have stopped being a misanthrope.

Irving Layton
In Pierre Elliot Trudeau, Canada has at last produced a political leader worthy of assassination.

Irving Layton
An aphorism
should be
like a burr:
sting,
stick,
and leave
a little soreness
afterwards.

Irving Layton
If poetry is like an orgasm, an academic can be likened to someone who studies the passion-stains on the bedsheets.

Irving Layton
God is indeed dead.
He died of self-horror
when He saw the creature He had made
in His own image.

Irving Layton
A Canadian is someone who keeps asking the question, 'What is a Canadian?

Irving Layton
It amazes me that organs that piss Can give human beings such perfect bliss.

Irving Layton
And me happiest when I compose poems:
Love, power, the huzza of battle
are something, are much:
yet a poem includes them like a pool
water and reflection.

Irving Layton
How seasonably
leaf and blossom uncurl
and living things arrange their death,
while someone from afar off
blows birthday candles for the world.

Irving Layton
Whom the gods do not intend to destroy, they first make mad with poetry.

Irving Layton