Top 33 I Am Not A Poet Quotes
#1. The tradition of the personal essay is full of self-appointed outcasts. In that tradition, I am not a poet or the press, but an essayist, a citizen thinker.
Eula Biss
#3. I'm a fiction writer, and I do write essays, but I am not a poet. And I absolutely reject the phrase 'woman writer' as anti-feminist. I wrote an essay about this as far back as 1977, at the height of the neo-feminist movement.
Cynthia Ozick
#4. I am a guest of the French language. My poems in French are born of my interaction with the French language, which is not the same as that of a French poet.
Tahar Ben Jelloun
#5. If you tell a novelist, 'Life's not like that', he has to do something about it. The poet simply replies, 'No, but I am.'
Philip Larkin
#6. And so I just grieve, groaning,
'Let me not go
To the Place of the Shorn:
My heart is now precious ...
For I, I am a poet
And my flower is golden.
David Bowles
#7. To my generation no other English poet seemed so perfectly to express the sensibility of a male adolescent. If I do not now turn to him very often, I am eternally grateful to him for the joy he gave me in my youth.
W. H. Auden
#8. I am not a nature poet. There is almost always a person in my poems.
Robert Frost
#9. I am a poet in deeds--not often in words.
Ian Fleming
#10. Tell me, cat-man, why can I understand her?"
"First," said Eanrin with a glower, "you will not call me 'cat-man' again. I am a knight, a poet, and a gentleman, and you will address me as sir or not address me at all.
Anne Elisabeth Stengl
#11. I'm not a poet and I'm not a nature lover and I'm not an Anarchist. I am, thank God, absolutely nothing.
Nescio
#12. I am not a painter. I am a poet. / Why? I think I would rather be / a painter, but I am not.
Frank O'Hara
#13. The orange blossom would have scarcely withered on the grave', as a poet might have said. But I am not poet. I am only a very conscientious recorder.
Vladimir Nabokov
#15. My child, you have a flawed grasp of the nature of myth-making. I am a poet and storyteller, a creator of ballads and sagas. Pray do not confuse the exercise of the imagination with mere mendacity. I am a master of the mysteries of words, their meanings and music and mellifluous magic.
Frances Hardinge
#16. I always was a rebel ... but on the other hand, I wanted to be loved and accepted ... and not just be a loudmouth, lunatic, poet, musician. But I cannot be what I am not.
John Lennon
#17. If I am going to be a poet at all, I am going to be POET and not NEGRO POET.
Countee Cullen
#18. I am a philosopher in the natural sciences. Matters of the heart I leave to the poets, but it has occurred to me, as a failed poet myself, that the cruelest aspect of love is its inviolable integrity. We do not choose to love - or I should say, we cannot choose not to love. Do you understand?
Rick Yancey
#19. I am not just a lesbian. I am not just a poet. I am not just a mother. Honor the complexity of your vision and yourselves.
Audre Lorde
#21. Sometimes I feel as if I am read before I write. When I write a poem about my mother, Palestinians think my mother is a symbol for Palestine. But I write as a poet, and my mother is my mother. She's not a symbol.
Mahmoud Darwish
#22. No, I'm not a great painter. Neither am I a great poet.
Claude Monet
#23. I do not understand why any poet or writer would run for office; that's a different sense of who you are. I'm just a poet. I am as truthful as I can be. That makes me an artist. I heed the people; I do not lead the people.
Nikki Giovanni
#24. I am losing my Soviet citizenship, I do not cease to be a Russian poet. I believe that I will return. Poets always return in flesh or on paper.
Joseph Brodsky
#25. Like the minor poet who knows the meanness of his gift, I am doomed to a lifetime of frustration: to be able to comprehend beauty, but not create it.
Elizabeth Bear
#26. I am not quite a poet but I am something of the kind.
Edmund Wilson
#28. I am a lover of love and I am a lover of words, and the two together spin visions of airy castles, but also may pierce the heart of hope. And so I remind you that I am a fool, a poet, and what matters is reality, not lovely words. Words are full of promise, yet empty of matter.
Waylon H. Lewis
#29. All that I am is me. So I'm not really a poet or a writer or an actor or an activist; I'm me, and these are things that I do.
John Trudell
#30. I've been trying to come to terms with what I am and what I do and what I believe in. And I see that I'm not happy with - well, it's almost as if being a poet is not enough for me. It's too late for me to do more now. I did what I could in a small way. I did it as theater, too, to be honest.
Gerald Stern
#31. Then you are a poet?' she asked, fingering the flyer in her pocket.
'No not at all,' he waved his hand. 'I am merely a character in a poem.
Karen Tei Yamashita
#32. But you have to understand that I consider myself a very modest artist, or whatever, and not of importance really at all - it is quite embarrassing to me to be asked my opinion about things. I am only a wee Scottish poet on the outside of everything.
Ian Hamilton Finlay
#33. If I am not mistaken, it was a British poet who said that 'no one is properly dressed unless he wears a smile.'
Sukarno
