Poetry Quotes
Why do writers, say, give up a job in economics and decide to write poetry? Or, why do they give up a job in a bank and decide to paint, like Krishan Khanna? They want to convey something.
Vikram Seth
O.K., I'm a rock critic. I also write and record music. I write poetry, fiction, straight journalism, unstraight journalism, beatnik drivel, mortifying love letters, death threats to white jazz critics signed 'The Mau Maus of East Harlem,' and once a year my own obituary (latest entry: 'He was promising...').
Lester Bangs
No poetry that I'm aware of, however bad or glorious, has ever left somebody a worse person than they were before they read it.
Felix Dennis
There's a love of rhetorical skill in the Muslim world. Osama bin Laden doesn't just go on tape cassettes and say, 'America sucks.' He recites poetry; he finds things that 'America sucks' rhymes with.
P. J. O'Rourke
Poetry for me is as much a spiritual practice as sexual ecstasy is.
James Broughton
Surrealism is not a poetry but a poetics, and even more, and more decisively, a world vision.
Octavio Paz
None but a poet can write a tragedy. For tragedy is nothing less than pain transmuted into exaltation by the alchemy of poetry.
Edith Hamilton
For me concrete poetry was a particular way of using language which came out of a particular feeling, and I don't have control over whether this feeling is in me or not.
Ian Hamilton Finlay
I've always written poetry and lyrics. My first husband, who was a musician, we wrote a bunch of songs together.
P. J. Soles
A documentary film-maker can't help but use poetry to tell the story. I bring truth to my fiction. These things go hand in hand.
Chloe Zhao
If I have to make a self-portrait, I would put poetry and rebellion on the list. To be able to walk on a wire, to be able to juggle six hoops, you need focus, another word for tenacity, which is passion.
Philippe Petit
As for political poetry, as it's usually defined, it seems there's very little good political poetry.
Kenneth Koch
The poetry of this one is called philosophical, of that one philological, of a third rhetorical, and so on. Which is then the poetic poetry?
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
The question has been asked, 'What is a woman?' A woman is a person who makes choices. A woman is a dreamer. A woman is a planner. A woman is a maker, and a molder. A woman is a person who makes choices. A woman builds bridges. A woman makes children and makes cars. A woman writes poetry and songs. A woman is a person who makes choices.
Eleanor Holmes Norton
There are interesting forms of difficulty, and there are unprofitable forms of difficulty. I mean, I enjoy some difficult poetry, but some of it is impenetrable and I actually wouldn't want to penetrate it if I could, perhaps.
Billy Collins
There are two ways to dislike poetry: One is to dislike it; the other is to read Pope.
Oscar Wilde
Poems have a different music from ordinary language, and every poem has a different kind of music of necessity, and that's, in a way, the hardest thing about writing poetry is waiting for that music, and sometimes you never know if it's going to come.
C. K. Williams
My verses are my diary. My poetry is a poetry of proper names.
Marina Tsvetaeva
I write poetry because I can’t disobey the impulse; it would be like blocking a spring that surges up in my throat. For a long time I’ve been the servant of the song that comes, that appears and can’t be buried away. How to seal myself up now?…It no longer matters to me who receives what I submit. What I carry out is, in that respect, greater and deeper than I, I am merely the channel.
Gabriela Mistral
I like to write about things that are dark or twisted. Where the poetry seems to be is when you start in the dark and reach for the light - that's what makes it not depressing to me.
Josh Homme
Queens of the Stone Age
We comfort ourselves by reliving memories of protection. Something closed must retain our memories, while leaving them their original value as images. Memories of the outside world will never have the same tonality as those of home and, by recalling these memories, we add to our store of dreams; we are never real historians, but always near poets, and our emotion is perhaps nothing but an expression of a poetry that was lost.
Gaston Bachelard
Poetry is the work of poets, not of peoples or communities; artistic creation can never be anything but the production of an individual mind.
Lascelles Abercrombie
