850 private quotes tagged poetry

“I guess I wanted to leave America for awhile. It wasn't that I wanted to become an expatriate, or just never come back, I needed some breathing room. I'd already been translating French poetry, I'd been to Paris once before and liked it very much, and so I just went.” — Paul Auster

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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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“There is the view that poetry should improve your life. I think people confuse it with the Salvation Army.” — John Ashbery

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“In politics, as in poetry, it is sometimes true that it is darkest before dawn.” — Lawrence Summers

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“I have been enlightened. I have fallen into poetry and it has swallowed me up.” — Keith Haring

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“Music is my thing. It's my thing it's what I love. It's what I do. It's football to me it's Christmas to me religion to me poetry to me.” — Ryan Adams

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“The whole thing about making films in an organic film on location is that it's not all about characters, relationships and themes, it's also about place and the poetry of place. It's about the spirit of what you find, the accidents of what you stumble across.” — Mike Leigh

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“On a summer night it can be lovely to sit around outside with friends after dinner and, yes, read poetry to each other. Keats and Yeats will never let you down, but it's differently exciting to read the work of poets who are still walking around out there.” — Michael Cunningham

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“Theater is far superior to film in poetry, in abstract poetry.” — Julie Taymor

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“I was in Paris at an English-language bookstore. I picked up a volume of Dickinson's poetry. I came back to my hotel, read 2,000 of her poems and immediately began composing in my head. I wrote down the melodies even before I got to a piano.” — Gordon Getty

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“Because people are very interested in my poetry, in what I say.” — Compay Segundo

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“Poetry can't cure cancer, but it can save your life until you die.” — Maurice Saatchi

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“A lyric, it is true, is the expression of personal emotion, but then so is all poetry, and to suppose that there are several kinds of poetry, differing from each other in essence, is to be deceived by wholly artificial divisions which have no real being.” — John Drinkwater

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“Any long work in which poetry is persistent, be it epic or drama or narrative, is really a succession of separate poetic experiences governed into a related whole by an energy distinct from that which evoked them.” — John Drinkwater

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“But in the finished art of the song the use of words has no connection with the use of words in poetry.” — John Drinkwater

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“For while the subjects of poetry are few and recurrent, the moods of man are infinitely various and unstable. It is the same in all arts.” — John Drinkwater

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“If it is an imperfect word, no external circumstance can heighten its value as poetry.” — John Drinkwater

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“It should here be added that poetry habitually takes the form of verse.” — John Drinkwater

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“Poetry being the sign of that which all men desire, even though the desire be unconscious, intensity of life or completeness of experience, the universality of its appeal is a matter of course.” — John Drinkwater

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“The musician - if he be a good one - finds his own perception prompted by the poet's perception, and he translates the expression of that perception from the terms of poetry into the terms of music.” — John Drinkwater

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“To know anything of a poet but his poetry is, so far as the poetry is concerned, to know something that may be entertaining, even delightful, but is certainly inessential.” — John Drinkwater

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“We recognise in the finished art, which is the result of these conditions, the best words in the best order - poetry and to put this essential poetry into different classes is impossible.” — John Drinkwater

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“Poetry is the mother-tongue of the human race.” — Johann Georg Hamann

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“There are men who can write poetry, and there are men who can read balance sheets. The men who can read balance sheets cannot write.” — Henry R. Luce

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“What we know is that Shakespeare wrote perhaps the most remarkable body of passionate love poetry in the English language to a young man.” — Stephen Greenblatt

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