“My favorite subject probably was math. I love math. Figures just intrigue me. I was really good at math. English probably was my worst subject. But I used to write a lot of poetry. I used to write poetry all the time.”
Topic
poetry
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“I think that's what poetry does. It allows people to come together and identify with a common thing that is outside of themselves, but which they identify with from the interior.”
“I know I'm not a wordsmith. And I don't write poetry. Sometimes I think I should, because it's really helpful. But I always wanted to write novels.”
“I'm not really one for fancy, big words and poetry, and the scriptwriters worked very hard on 'Paradise Lost' to translate it.”
“A lot of people think, 'I'll give acting or poetry or filmmaking a try. And if it doesn't work out I'll go get a law degree, do something else that's more practical.' For me I went the reverse way. I lived the back-up plan.”
“I come here to speak poetry. It will always be in the grass. It will also be necessary to bend down to hear it. It will always be too simple to be discussed in assemblies.”
“I don't write poetry and then strum some chords and then fit the words on top of the chords.”
“The middle class is doing fine in fiction. But it's not what gets me going. I love the working class, and everyone from it I've met, and think they're incredibly witty, inventive - there's a lot of poetry there.”
“Art works because it appeals to certain faculties of the mind. Music depends on details of the auditory system, painting and sculpture on the visual system. Poetry and literature depend on language.”
“I credit poetry for making this space-walk possible.”
“Manifesting that order of poetry where we can at last grow up to that which we stored up as we grew.”
“The completely solitary self: that's where poetry comes from, and it gets isolated by crisis, and those crises are often very intimate also.”
“The fact of the matter is that the most unexpected and miraculous thing in my life was the arrival in it of poetry itself - as a vocation and an elevation almost.”
“Science fiction, outside of poetry, is the only literary field which has no limits, no parameters whatsoever.”
“I want people to bow as they see me and say he is gifted with poetry, he has seen the presence of the creator.”
“In the total darkness, poetry is still there, and it is there for you.”
“Poetry always runs away from you - it's very difficult to grasp it, and every time you read it, depending on your conditions, you will have a different grasp of it. Whereas with a novel, once you have read it, you have grasped it.”
“Journalism is concerned with events, poetry with feelings. Journalism is concerned with the look of the world, poetry with the feel of the world.”
“While I've had a great distaste for what's usually called song in modern poetry or for what's usually called music, I really don't think of speech as so far from song.”
“I hardly remember how I started to write poetry. It's hard to imagine what I thought poetry could do.”
“The romanticised life, where all the great poetry and music and art of the world comes from, is great but it requires a lot of self-indulgence.”
“Poetry is one of the destinies of speech... One would say that the poetic image, in its newness, opens a future to language.”
“In Australia, not reading poetry is the national pastime.”
“The office of poetry is not to make us think accurately, but feel truly.”