Famous Quotes & Sayings

Peter Davison

For instance, it's a little better now than it was two or three years ago, but something like 70% of the poems I receive seem to be written in the present indicative.

Peter Davison

The reason one writes poems is so that your poem will be remembered.

Harry Mathews

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.

James Fenton

Rhyme is a mnemonic device, an aid to the memory. And some poems are themselves mnemonics, that is to say, the whole purpose of the poem is to enable us to remember some information.

Sylvia Plath

But writing poems and letters doesn't seem to do much good.

E. P. Thompson

Great cultural conversation used to show up in poems and essays. It's alive and well but in superficial places like commercials.

Gerard Manley Hopkins

What is all this juice and all this joy?

John Burnside

The animal encounter poem is now so distinct a genre that it would be possible to create a full-length anthology from deer encounter poems alone, and many varieties of experience would emerge from such an exercise.

Alice McDermott

I believed in fictional characters as if they were a part of real life. Poetry was important, too. My parents had memorized poems from their days attending school in New York City and loved reciting them. We all enjoyed listening to these poems and to music as well.

I love poetry; it's my primary literary interest, and I suppose the kind of reading you do when you are reading poems - close reading - can carry over into how you read other things.

Jane Yolen

It seems like I've been writing since birth! I started writing poems before I got to school. I wrote the class musical in first grade - both words and music. It was about a bunch of vegetables who got together in a salad. I played the chief carrot!

It seems to me that if poems should do anything, they should confirm our intimacy at least point us in that direction,

Philip Levine

In my twenties, before I learned how to write poems of work, I thought of myself as the person who would capture this world.

Jeff Lindsay

I had been writing poems and stories since I learned to make letters. I had placed poems in a hardcover anthology at the age of 6. And I knew more big words than anyone else in the 10th grade.

C. K. Williams

I tended to write poems about both social and spiritual problems, and some problems one doesn't really want to solve, and so the problems themselves are solved. You certainly don't want to solve problems in poems that haven't been solved in the world.

Jessye Norman

I read everything. I'll read a John Grisham novel, I'll sit and read a whole book of poems by Maya Angelou, or I'll just read some Mary Oliver - this is a book that was given to me for Christmas. No particular genre. And I read in French, and I read in German, and I read in English. I love to see how other people use language.

Mary Szybist

I turn to poems to find spaces that might enlarge, rather than distill, experience.

John Donne

The book has been kind of a long time in coming. I've been writing since high school and this is my first book and it's kind of drawn from poems written over an extended period.

E. P. Thompson

In a way, this is giving these kids' poems to the wind.

Natalie Goldberg

It's the process of writing and life that matters... We are trying to become sane along with our poems and stories.

King Krule

I'm trying to create a collection of stories - the 'U.F.O.W.A.V.E.' songs are all stories. I haven't really taken direct lyrical influence from other songwriters, but my dad bought me a book of W.H. Auden's poems when I was younger, and the imagery really interested me.

I'm not sure of any direct influence, but some of my most successful poems are short poems. They have kind of a distilled focus, like Dickinson. They're very elliptical. She is quite elliptical - she distills down to the core. But my poetry doesn't sound like Dickinson's.

Miguel de Cervantes

It is one thing to write as poet and another to write as a historian: the poet can recount or sing about things not as they were, but as they should have been, and the historian must write about them not as they should have been, but as they were, without adding or subtracting anything from the truth.

Cassie Steele

I came from a very musical family, so I grew up singing karaoke with the family. My family said 'do this' and brought me to singing lessons. I had always been writing poems and songs.

Seamus Heaney

Anyone with gumption and a sharp mind will take the measure of two things: what's said and what's done.

Kevin Powers

I've been writing poems and stories since I was about 13.

Michael Redhill

The idea of a pseudonym had been flitting around my brain for a long time, along with its cognate, disappearance. In the 1980s, I published some poems under a pen name in a literary magazine to see what it would feel like. It was fun. It was even a little thrilling.

The greatest satisfaction comes from publishing interesting poems and well written, thoughtful critical material, and to help build a community.

The limit is about 300 words. Kipling's ""Recessional"" really did something to England when it was published. It helped them through a bad time. Let me know if you find any great poems lying around.

Lisel Mueller

When I am asked how I began writing poems, I talk about the indifference of nature.

Leo Tolstoy

We imagine that when we are thrown out of our usual ruts all is lost, but it is only then that what is new and good begins. While there is life there is happiness. There is much, much before us.

Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

Considered subjectively, philosophy always begins in the middle, like an epic poem.

Wislawa Szymborska

I prefer the absurdity of writing poems to the absurdity of not writing poems.