850 private quotes tagged poetry

“And yet, in a culture like ours, which is given to material comforts, and addicted to forms of entertainment that offer immediate gratification, it is surprising that so much poetry is written.” — Mark Strand

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“And at least in poetry you should feel free to lie. That is, not to lie, but to imagine what you want, to follow the direction of the poem.” — Mark Strand

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“A life is not sufficiently elevated for poetry, unless, of course, the life has been made into an art.” — Mark Strand

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“A great many people seem to think writing poetry is worthwhile, even though it pays next to nothing and is not as widely read as it should be.” — Mark Strand

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“I published, privately, a collection of my serious poetry I had written over the years. I only published 50 copies, which I gave to friends, in a special deluxe edition. It was ridiculously expensive but I'm glad that I did it.” — Tom Glazer

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“Well, the great thing for me about poetry is that in good poems the dislocation of words, that is to say, the distance between what they say they're saying and what they are actually saying is at its greatest.” — Harry Mathews

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“Well, I had this little notion - I started writing when I was eleven, writing poetry. I was passionately addicted to it it was my great refuge through adolescence.” — Harry Mathews

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“My next project is to get back to that. Actually, to learn how to write poetry. I'm not kidding.” — Harry Mathews

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“Even the people who have had success and made money writing these books of fiction seem to feel the need to pretend it's no big deal, or part of a natural progression from poetry to fiction, but often it's really just about the money, the perceived prestige.” — George Murray

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“Humour is a fine line to walk in poetry, as in fiction. I just think it's harder to write. It's harder to keep the respect of the reader too.” — George Murray

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“I've often entertained paranoid suspicions about my fridge and what it's been doing to my poetry when I'm not looking, but I never even considered that my fan was thinking about me.” — George Murray

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“The poetry community here has been extraordinarily welcoming.” — George Murray

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“Then I discovered I loved writing poetry more than fiction.” — George Murray

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“Writing poetry makes you intensely conscious of how words sound, both aloud and inside the head of the reader. You learn the weight of words and how they sound to the ear.” — Helen Dunmore

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“I've always written. When I was in school, the only teacher who ever liked me was my creative writing teacher. I used to enter poetry competitions, and I don't think I ever lost one. So I had the idea for a while of being some kind of poet.” — Justin Townes Earle

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“I heard Nirvana, and discovered that songs could be like poetry, but a little bit more refined: you didn't have to have 20 verses to get your point across.” — Justin Townes Earle

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“I began the way nearly everybody I ever heard of - I began writing poetry. And I find that to be quite usual with writers, their trying their hand at poetry.” — Shelby Foote

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“I used to write sonnets and various things, and moved from there into writing prose, which, incidentally, is a lot more interesting than poetry, including the rhythms of prose.” — Shelby Foote

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“Most people can't tell now who wrote what. I like that blurring of identities within the band. because it becomes a unified thing that can't be related to other forms of historical poetry.” — Thurston Moore

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“So I suppose poetry, language, the shaping of it, was and remains for me an effort to make sense out of essentially senseless situations.” — Thomas Lynch

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“Poetry is all nouns and verbs.” — Marianne Moore

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“I see no reason for calling my work poetry except that there is no other category in which to put it.” — Marianne Moore

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“Poetry, especially traditional Iranian poetry, is very good at looking at things from a number of different angles simultaneously.” — Asghar Farhadi

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“As for political poetry, as it's usually defined, it seems there's very little good political poetry.” — Kenneth Koch

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“I love painting and music, of course. I don't know nearly as much about them as I know about poetry. I've certainly been influenced by fiction. I was overwhelmed by War and Peace when I read it, and I didn't read it until I was in my late 20s.” — Kenneth Koch

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