Poet Quotes
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I never became a writer for the money. I am a poet first. Even getting published is a miracle for poets.
Erica Jong
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My biggest poetic influences are probably 20th-century British and Irish poets. So I suppose I'm always listening for the music I associate with that poetry, the telling images, the brevity. I want to hear it in my own work as well as in the poetry I read. However, I think I'm generally more forgiving of other poets than myself.
David Starkey
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In particular I may mention Sophocles the poet, who was once asked in my presence, How do you feel about love, Sophocles? are you still capable of it? to which he replied, Hush! if you please: to my great delight I have escaped from it, and feel as if I had escaped from a frantic and savage master. I thought then, as I do now, that he spoke wisely. For unquestionably old age brings us profound repose and freedom from this and other passions.
Plato
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If I correctly understand the sense of this succinct observation, our poet suggests here that human life is but a series of footnotes to a vast obscure unfinished masterpiece.
Vladimir Nabokov
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I don't pretend to understand him, but I can enjoy him as a poet and comedian. I liked the idea of the eternal return. Sometimes I think that being on tour year after year is an eternal return; you play a certain club in Copenhagen and then ten years later you are back again, traveling the same roads year after year.
Dean Wareham
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Every artist is a cannibal/every poet is a thief/all kill for inspiration/and then sing about the grief.
Bono
U2
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We are chained hand and foot by protocol, enslaved to a static, empty world where men and women can’t read, where the scientific advances of the ages are the preserve of the rich, where artists and poets are doomed to endless repetitions and sterile reworking of past masterpieces. Nothing is new. New does not exist. Nothing changes, nothing grows, evolves, develops. Time has stopped. Progress is forbidden
Catherine Fisher
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Of all mankind the great poet is the equable man. Not in him but off from him things are grotesque or eccentric or fail of their sanity.
Walt Whitman
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I was always interested in French poetry sort of as a sideline to my own work, I was translating contemporary French poets. That kind of spilled out into translation as a way to earn money, pay for food and put bread on the table.
Paul Auster
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A fugitive becomes a queen or a scientist or, worse, a poet.
Amal El-Mohtar
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The player envies only the player, the poet envies only the poet.
William Hazlitt
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Today we haven't the heart to expel the painters and poets from society because we refuse to admit to ourselves that there is any danger in keeping them in our midst.
Pablo Picasso
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There is a pleasure in poetic pains / Which only poets know.
William Cowper
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And when we are writing the life of a woman, we may, it is agreed, waive our demand for action, and substitute love instead. Love, the poet has said, is a woman's whole existence.
Virginia Woolf
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Love, the poet said, is woman's whole existence.
Virginia Woolf
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The spirit of the poet craves spectators... even if only buffaloes.
Friedrich Nietzsche
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The events in America now have the quality of things you would find out about long after the fact, and think: if only we had known. Well, we do know now. But what are we doing? Maybe a poet like Lowell brought America a little nearer to its boiling point.
Dan Chiasson
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We are all youthful barbarians, and only our new toys bring us excitement. That has been the sole purpose of our flights. This one flies higher, that one faster. But now we will make ourselves at home. We will forget the machine, the tool. It is no longer complex; it does what it is supposed to do, unnoticed. And through this tool we will find again the old nature, the nature of the gardener, the navigator, the poet.
Antoine de Saint-Exupery
