Daily Inspiration Quote by Hugo Claus

There is a wonderfully awkward humility baked into Claus's image of his own poems "gawping". He doesn't present the verse as a monument or a mastered craft; he personifies it as a socially clumsy lodger, eyes wide, slightly out of place. That choice matters. "Gawping" is not reverent attention, it's the untrained stare of something that hasn't learned the rules of the room. Claus lets the reader feel the dissonance between the private act of writing and the public fact of having written: once the poem exists, it starts looking back at you.

"I never get used to this" is the quiet admission of an artist refusing the comfort of routine. For a novelist with a long career and a reputation in Flemish letters, the line punctures the myth of professional ease. The subtext is that creative work doesn't become less strange with practice; it becomes stranger because it accumulates. Which is why the next sentence lands like a dry punchline: "They've lived here long enough". The poems are domesticated only in duration, not in intimacy. They're in the house, but not fully "at home."

Claus, writing in a postwar European tradition suspicious of grand statements, treats art less as self-expression than as a persistent presence that won't quite merge with its maker. The intent isn't self-deprecation for its own sake; it's a way of guarding the work's autonomy. The poems are his, yet they remain slightly foreign bodies - enduring, watchful, and, in their awkwardness, stubbornly alive.