Billy Stoneking

“No matter how cleverly we disguise our anxieties they bear witness to the imperfect nature of the human heart. To be is to become. To become is not to be. We are a work-in-progress, incomplete, imperfect, unrealised, and by virtue of temporal actions, temporary - a verb more than a noun, an inner quest and an outward odyssey framed by metaphors, like Escher's "Print Gallery"; we make the endless journey round the pictures, retracing our steps in forgetfulness, avoiding but mindful of the space where there are no pictures, where there is no gallery, where there is nothing at all. And like flies in a fly bottle, trapped by a failure of vision, we go round and round and round the moebius loop of a print gallery of our own making, a picture inside a picture inside a picture, forever.”
― Billy Marshall Stoneking

“What monster sleeps in the deep of your story? You need a monster. Without a monster there is no story.”
― Billy Marshall Stoneking

“The burning off and the gathering together are one.”
― Billy Marshall-Stoneking, Singing the snake: Poems from the western desert, 1979-1988

“From the writer's perspective, audience is always an act of the imagination.”
― Billy Marshall Stoneking