Top 86 How To Write Poetry Quotes
#1. You're walking by the tomb of Battiades,
Who knew well how to write poetry, and enjoy
Laughter at the right moment, over the wine.
Callimachus
#2. They go to Paris to learn how to make bombs and they come back having learned only how to write poetry, which they think is more explosive.
Rana Dasgupta
#3. My next project is to get back to that. Actually, to learn how to write poetry. I'm not kidding.
Harry Mathews
#4. The piano is kind of like a dance floor for our thoughts you know? A very woody foundation so that we can really focus on the poetry.
Bianca C
#5. You told me once
about how they used
to build whole city states
out of poems
how everything you see here
is made out of
the bones of dreams
how having a stiff
drink with lorca meant
you had to write
everything down right away
lately the words just
won't come
John Dorsey
#6. I wanted to write poetry almost a little more than I wanted to eat.
Paul Engle
#7. The poet is he who can write some pure mythology today without the aid of posterity.
Henry David Thoreau
#8. The kind of poetry I write, lyric poetry, I think is really concerned with intimacy, with mystery. That needn't be religious mystery, there are mysteries to do with everyday life.
Kevin Hart
#9. You were the poem I never knew how to write because no words could describe the wind you cannot see, but feel.
Shannon L. Alder
#10. I am often asked why I started to write poetry. The answer is that my motivation sprang from a visceral need to creatively articulate the experiences of the black youth of my generation, coming of age in a racist society.
Linton Kwesi Johnson
#11. She was the reason I started to write but her beauty is kept me writing.
Brandon Villasenor
#12. It's really rather easy to write eighth-century Chinese poetry," said Angus Lordie. "In English, of course. It requires little effort, I find.
Alexander McCall Smith
#13. 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.
Candace Bushnell
#14. There are three good things in this world. One is to read poetry, another is to write poetry, and the best of all is to live poetry.
Rupert Brooke
#15. What you have to realize when you write poetry, or if you love poetry, is that poetry is just naturally the greatest god damn thing that ever was in the whole universe
James Dickey
#16. Whenever I write a dramatic poem I can't understand why the characters should ever want to be anything but poets themselves.
Saul Bellow
#17. I'd advise all you songwriters out there, if you're getting into it for the business, go home and get a job digging ditches or something. Get a life. You'll learn a lot more, and you won't write a lot of rotten poetry.
Butch Hancock
#18. 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.
Herschel Walker
#19. I write poems about relationships, love relationships, and I'm not able to do that all the time. I could go two years without writing poems, and then write a dozen. Having a novel to work on, with the intricate puzzle of character and plot to work out, is satisfying for the time there is no poetry.
May Sarton
#20. I guess the quality that makes one write poetry keeps one from selling it.
Louise Closser Hale
#21. I find that when people haven't found God and do not know the new birth and the Spirit is not on them, yet they have the ancient impulse to worship something. If they're not educated they kill a chicken and put a funny thing on their head and dance around. If they are educated they write poetry.
A.W. Tozer
#22. Think what you hope for is that at different times of your life you're able to write the poetry that reflects the moment that you're in on your own journey.
Edward Hirsch
#23. To write poetry and to commit suicide, apparently so contradictory, had really been the same, attempts at escape.
John Fowles
#24. When a man does not write his poetry, it escapes by other vents through him.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#25. If I wouldn't of spent so much time shooting spit wads at my English teacher I'd know how to punctuate good thing I normally write poetry.
Stanley Victor Paskavich
#26. While I was in school, trying to figure out how to write an essay that could both satisfy my nonfiction workshops and still pass as something hybrid-y enough for my poetry workshops, I was looking for models, for forebears.
John D'Agata
#27. Decades from now, my grandchild is going to be a poet... And she's going to write about how she's a living testament to how her grandmother made love to hurricane and calmed the storm.
Danabelle Gutierrez
#28. If i write a book it will probably be a book about how not to use the internet or a book of poetry.
Misha Collins
#29. Poetry happens when there is nothing to say but you have a volcano hidden inside you waiting to erupt.
Debasish Mridha
#30. you see, the thing is, I just don't know
how to write anything that doesn't
start with a lump in my throat.
And I really don't know how to write anything
that doesn't end with your hands on my neck.
Danabelle Gutierrez
#31. In high school, my English teacher Celeste McMenamin introduced me to the great novels and Shakespeare and taught me how to write. Essays, poetry, critical analysis. Writing is a skill that was painful then but a love of mine now.
Aaron Lazar
#32. There is poetry in fiction. If you cannot see it and feel it when you write, you need to step back and examine what you are doing wrong. If you have not figured out how to write a simple declarative sentence and make it sing with that poetry, you are not yet ready to write an entire book.
Terry Brooks
#33. How vain it seems to write, when one knows how to feel
how much more near and dear to sit beside you, talk with you, hear the tones of your voice ... Give me strength, Susie, write me of hope and love, and of hearts that endure ...
Emily Dickinson
#34. For all the years I'd spent talking about pictures, the truth was that I had no idea how to draw or what it felt like to do it. I would mistrust a poetry critic who couldn't produce a rhyming couplet. Could one write about art without knowing how to draw?
Adam Gopnik
#35. If we were to understand how important it is to say something and say it well, maybe we wouldn't write a single word, but that would be tragic.
Dejan Stojanovic
#36. He found himself wanting to write poetry about how her blue eyes were like starlight and her hair like night, because "night" and "starlight" rhymed, but he had a feeling the poem wouldn't turn out that well ...
Cassandra Clare
#37. So how can a poet-an intelligent, serious poet-write mystical verse now? The poetry of Adam Zagajewski provides the beginning of an answer to this question.
Adam Kirsch
#39. I am a writer, which means I write stories, I write novels, and I would write poetry if I knew how to. I don't want to limit myself.
Aleksandar Hemon
#40. One problem we face comes from the lack of any agreed sense of how we should be working to train ourselves to write poetry.
James Fenton
#41. If I knew how to say it directly, I would not need to write poetry. I would just talk to people and be happy.
Selima Hill
#42. But most love poetry is awful; nobody knows how to write good love poetry either. But that's not a reason not to write love poetry. Some of the best poetry ever written has been love poetry, and some of the greatest poetry ever written has been political poetry.
W.S. Merwin
#43. You obsess (but of course you obsess) until the joy is gone from that thing you'd loved, until your fury overwhelms your passion, until you no longer know how to sit with your back against a tree and write poetry that no one will ever see.
Beth Kephart
#44. How does one happen to write a poem: where does it come from? That is the question asked by the psychologists or the geneticists of poetry.
Allen Tate
#46. I hope that the feeling of making poetry is not confined to the people who write it down. There is no luxury like it, and I hope we all share it ... I am sure that the great glory of poetry in one's heart does not wait on achievement.
Stella Benson
#47. Go home and write / a page tonight. / And let that page come out of you - / Then, it will be true.
Langston Hughes
#49. Write poetry as if you were in love. If you are always in love you will not always write the same poem, but if you are never in love, you may.
- from My Olivetti Speaks
Kenneth Koch
#50. The most ignorant person, at a reasonable charge, and with a little bodily labour, might write books in philosophy, poetry, politics, laws, mathematics, and theology, without the least assistance from genius or study.
Jonathan Swift
#51. Life has sadness, joy, beauty, like poetry.
So be passionate and write a great story.
Debasish Mridha
#52. I write poems for myself and I write poetry that gets torn apart and becomes songs. I have a lot of respect for words, the power of words.
Kurt Cobain
#53. I wanna make growing old with you
the last poem I ever have to write
Michael Biondi
#54. Because you fight it out, and stumble, and write bad poetry, and pick yourself up again, and at the end, hopefully, someday youre sitting with your kid on her bedroom floor, talking about how you screwed everything up too.
Josie Bloss
#55. The neurologist had dismissed her case after a single visit, handing out an easy nostrum by telling her father that if she continued to write poetry, she would be all right.
Flora Rheta Schreiber
#56. But you hate poetry! Yes, but you make me want to write it.
Cassandra Clare
#57. When you write about what you dream, you become a writer.
When you dream about what you write, you become haunted by a curse.
A. Saleh
#58. You mean you're comparing our lives to a sonnet? A strict form, but freedom within it? Yes. Mrs. Whatsit said. You're given the form, but you have to write the sonnet yourself. What you say is completely up to you.
Madeleine L'Engle
#59. I have experienced healing through other writers' poetry, but there's no way I can sit down to write in the hope a poem will have healing potential. If I do, I'll write a bad poem.
Marilyn Hacker
#60. But I can only write what the muse allows me to write. I cannot choose, I can only do what I am given, and I feel pleased when I feel close to concrete poetry - still.
Ian Hamilton Finlay
#61. Deals are my art form. Other people paint beautifully on canvas or write wonderful poetry. I like making deals, preferably big deals. That's how I get my kicks.
Ed Koch
#62. There are two kinds of love. One kind you live with, the other you write poetry about.
Debasish Mridha
#63. For me, movies and television are interesting because they are the dominant storytelling form of our time. My first love will always be fiction, and especially novels, but I'm a writer ... I write poetry and essays and criticism and I'd love to write a whole play, and sometimes I even write scripts.
Jess Walter
#64. You write so beautifully
the inside of your mind must be a terrible place
Unknown
#65. I had hoped to be a poet, and for a long time I tried to write poetry. My first published pieces were poems.
Norman Lock
#66. I write poetry anyway and have for years and years. For me, putting fiction and poetry together is like the best of both worlds.
Ellen Hopkins
#67. 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
#68. Love leads us to write poetry because love improves our hearing; like prayer, poetry is every bit as much about listening as it is about speaking. To 'get' the poem is to hear the eloquence of the silence that it calls forth through its manifestation of love.
David Patterson
#69. It is not good form to take a Trick out unless one is so firmly established as to be able to afford being associated with someone who might at any given moment write a poem in public.
Fran Lebowitz
#70. I think what will happen is that fiction will become more like poetry. As in, the only people who read it will write it.
Gary Shteyngart
#71. I hardly remember how I started to write poetry. It's hard to imagine what I thought poetry could do.
David Antin
#72. What I write could only be called poetry because there is no other category to put it.
Marianne Moore
#73. I write poetry because I want to be alone and want to talk to people.
Allen Ginsberg
#74. Poetry is simple when you write what you see and feel, searching for the words only makes it difficult
Rayvon L. Browne
#75. The mere ambition to write a poem is enough to kill it.
Henri Michaux
#76. Often one spends weeks trying to write a poem out of the conscious mind that never comes to anything - these are sort of 'ideal' poems that one feels ought to be written, but don't because (I fancy) they lack the vital spark of self-interest. A 'real' poem is a pleasure to write.
Philip Larkin
#78. The experimental poetry thing is not my thing. It's a programme of the avant-garde: basically a refusal of the kind of poetry I write.
Seamus Heaney
#79. Take your materials from what is around you - if you see a dandelion, write about that; if it's misty, write about the mist. The materials for poetry are all about you in profusion.
Masaoka Shiki
#80. Poetry is a solitary process. One does not write poetry for the masses. Poetry is a self-involved, lofty pursuit. Songs are for the people. When I'm writing a song, I imagine performing it. I imagine giving it. It's a different aspect of communication. It's for the people.
Patti Smith
#81. Every poem I write falls short in some important way. But I go on trying to write the one that won't.
Dorianne Laux
#82. I want to write a book of poetry, as well as children's stories.
Bobby McFerrin
#83. Poetry is sentimental to begin with. To write a sentimental poem is an act of redundancy.
Mary Ruefle
#84. What you're feeling now, and the person you may reach with your words five years from now-that's why you write poetry.
Colleen Hoover
#85. How can any one paint who cannot grade colors? How can any one write poetry who has not learnt to hear and see?
Maria Montessori
#86. you say you often feel this madness. what do you do when it comes upon you?
I write poetry.
is poetry madness?
non-poetry is madness.
what is madness?
madness is ugliness.
what is ugly?
to each man, something different.
Charles Bukowski
