Top 100 I Write Poetry Quotes
#1. 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
#2. 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
#3. 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
#4. 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
#5. I write poetry because I want to be alone and want to talk to people.
Allen Ginsberg
#6. I write all the time - I write poetry, I love to write.
Colin Quinn
#7. I write poetry to heal pieces of me
time as missed.
Kiana Davis
#8. I write poetry to figure things out. Any time I'm trying to wrap my head around something, poetry is like a puzzle-solving strategy for me.
Sarah Kay
#9. Often when I write poetry I don't quite know what I'm saying myself. I mean, I can't restate the poem. The meaning of the poem is the poem.
Pattiann Rogers
#10. Men don't interest me. Not that I'm a lesbian. Don't get that idea. I write poetry.
Stephen King
#11. I write poetry. It comes naturally to me, but from a technical point of view it forces me to pay close attention to language and to scan.
Rita Mae Brown
#12. My relationship stays strong because I serenade her with my actions and I write poetry in her heart with my deeds. My endless love is expressed with more than just my words; my love is lived as a verb.
Steve Maraboli
#13. I want to branch out. I want to write. I write poetry. I want to see my children grow up well.
Annie Lennox
#14. I write poetry, and I put it to a beat - I mean, that's what they call rap.
Keith Stanfield
#15. I was asked once why I write poetry. I said, why do you breath?
Shannon Lynette
#17. I have a dark and dreadful secret. I write poetry ... I believe poetry is a primal impulse within all of us. I believe we are all capable of it and furthermore that a small, often ignored corner of us positively yearns to try it.
Stephen Fry
#18. 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
#19. 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
#20. 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
#21. 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
#23. I wanna make growing old with you
the last poem I ever have to write
Michael Biondi
#24. 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
#25. I want to write a book of poetry, as well as children's stories.
Bobby McFerrin
#26. Every poem I write falls short in some important way. But I go on trying to write the one that won't.
Dorianne Laux
#27. 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
#28. 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
#29. 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
#30. What I write could only be called poetry because there is no other category to put it.
Marianne Moore
#31. I hardly remember how I started to write poetry. It's hard to imagine what I thought poetry could do.
David Antin
#32. 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
#33. 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
#34. 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
#35. I guess the quality that makes one write poetry keeps one from selling it.
Louise Closser Hale
#36. 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
#37. 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
#38. 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
#39. Whenever I write a dramatic poem I can't understand why the characters should ever want to be anything but poets themselves.
Saul Bellow
#40. 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
#41. 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
#42. She was the reason I started to write but her beauty is kept me writing.
Brandon Villasenor
#43. 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
#44. 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
#45. 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
#46. I wanted to write poetry almost a little more than I wanted to eat.
Paul Engle
#47. I'm a poet. I'm just a renaissance man in my heart. I can build shelves and I can write poetry.
Anthony Mackie
#48. Today I write,
riots with insite!
Tomorrow I read,
take the lead!
Sometimes I sleep, health to keep!
But for now I write,
and got no gripe!
Leslie Austin
#49. I'm looking for a guy who makes you want to dance and write poetry all day long.
Angela Sarafyan
#50. I'm a failed poet. Maybe every novelist wants to write poetry first, finds he can't, and then tries the short story, which is the most demanding form after poetry. And, failing at that, only then does he take up novel writing.
William Faulkner
#51. I wonder if I ever thought of an ideal reader ... I guess when I was in my 20s and in New York and maybe even in my early 30s, I would write for my wife Janice ... mainly for my poet friends and my wife, who was very smart about poetry.
Kenneth Koch
#52. I started writing poetry in high school because I wanted desperately to write, but somehow, writing stories didn't appeal to me, and I loved the flow and the feel and sense of poetry, especially that of what one might call formal verse.
L.E. Modesitt Jr.
#53. You fantasize about me reading my poems to you - it doesn't work that way - I write down everything later - living is not an after-thought ...
John Geddes
#54. Well I guess the plan was to write poetry and publish books and make a living from writing poetry. That was a pretty ambitious plan I guess.
Robert Adamson
#55. I was so used to doing art that my fingers were like albino spiders. So it was just natural for me to go to a typewriter and write poetry.
Patti Smith
#56. Well, I like to write poetry. I'm a published poet.
Misha Collins
#57. I write to forget the days that broke me into a million nights.
Jenim Dibie
#58. Stop the tape, cut the paper! I will just write another poem and grab a microphone and push record again!
Delano Johnson
#59. If I could write words
Like leaves on an autumn forest floor,
What a bonfire my letters would make.
If I could speak words of water,
You would drown when I said
I love you.
Spike Milligan
#60. I tend to write poetry that is rich in data of various sorts. The lyric poem isn't perfectly suited to accommodating such data, so I've had to find new ways to say everything that I want to say.
Campbell McGrath
#61. I'm perfectly happy when I look out at an audience and it's all women. I always think it's kind of odd, but then, more women than men, I think, read and write poetry.
Diane Wakoski
#63. I didn't write anything at all except book reports until I was in seventh grade, and then I wrote mostly poetry for myself.
Cynthia Voigt
#64. When I was a kid I would write songs, little plays, and poetry in school. If you're an adult and you're a poet, it's all about love and pain, but if you're a kid it's, "Does anyone know a word that rhymes with shark?"
Mike Birbiglia
#65. I'm not a writer. I think I can write short stories and poetry, but film writing, brilliant film writing, is a talent - you can't just do it like that.
Samantha Morton
#66. My next project is to get back to that. Actually, to learn how to write poetry. I'm not kidding.
Harry Mathews
#67. 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
#68. I dropped my hoe and ran into the house and started to write this poem, 'End of Summer.' It began as a celebration of wild geese. Eventually the geese flew out of the poem, but I like to think they left behind the sound of their beating wings.
Stanley Kunitz
#69. I always read poetry before I write, to sensitize me to the rhythms and music of language.
Janet Fitch
#70. Well, I still write poetry, but I wouldn't call myself a poet.
David Duchovny
#71. I started writing poetry and philosophy when I was 17 years old and my mind so was wild. Now I'm 56 and I often want to write like a child.
Stanley Victor Paskavich
#72. My first book was poetry, but I didn't write it first. I wrote it third. So my first two books were prose.
Tao Lin
#73. Write to me your most perfect epitaph, or I shall compare a poet to a lecturer. Thou art more Spartan than a ballad monger who makes his living as a Wal-Mart greeter;
Scott Jonathan Nixon
#74. I don't write poems
to melt your heart.
I write them,
so our hearts
can melt together.
Subhan Zein
#75. I wanted to write the kind of poetry that people read and remembered, that they lived by - the kinds of lines that I carried with me from moment to moment on a given day without even having chosen to.
Tracy K. Smith
#76. I was completely devoted to reading and books from the age of seven. It took until I was 18 to have the confidence to write poetry.
Christopher Koch
#77. I will go to campus alone dressed in antique silk slips and beat-up cowboy boots and gypsy beads, and I will study poetry. I will sit on the edge of the fountain in the plaza and write.
Francesca Lia Block
#78. I know why people write poetry," Javi says. "Because they're a bunch of emotional saps with nothin' better to do than whine about ex-girlfriends and dead dogs."
"You're wrong, Javi," I say. "That's called country music.
Colleen Hoover
#79. I wrote so meagerly to you. But what I couldn't write
swelled and swelled like an old-fashioned airship
and drifted away at last through the night sky.
Tomas Transtromer
#80. i write
because
it is
the only way
i can
reach you.
Sanober Khan
#81. She reminded me that I could write stories,/
could be struck by lightning & live.
Jen Currin
#82. I'd reconstruct Heaven, or usurp Hell
write till I swing open like a door hinge.
I arrive - a rogue who'd refurbish town.
I take my pen, begin to nail things down.
B.J. Ward
#83. I am looking for a poem that says Everything so I don't have to write anymore.
Tukaram
#84. As a fairly innocent teenager, growing up in a village in Wales, I just thought, "God, I would like to go and hang about Soho and write great poetry and try to avoid drinking myself to death."
Andrew Davies
#85. I have piles of poetry books in the bathroom, on the stairs, everywhere. The only way to write poetry is to read it.
Carol Ann Duffy
#86. It is true that I didn't write any poetry between 1995 and 2011. The reason for this was probably because I had stayed away from fiction for so long and couldn't tear myself away from it.
Yuriy Tarnawsky
#87. I am the girl who spends hours huddled in a corner of a library, trying to find what you love the most about Marlowe, just so I can write you a poem worthy of Shakespeare. I've made books my lovers, hours my enemies and you the only story.
Nikita Gill
#88. I'm conscious of a series of circles working its way through my life. And at this particular moment I have come round to the beginning of my writing cycle. It begins with poetry. There's hardly a day that goes past on which I don't write poetry.
Ben Okri
#89. I've finally decided to write about profit for a change
But before I really started I already started to feel lame
Baby what's it to a beast who manely to money remains untamed
Criss Jami
#90. I don't write poetry for the page because my inclination in that area is satisfied by songwriting. "Ornamental Hermit" was a comparatively effortless song to write, which is rare for me.
David Grubbs
#91. Dear, I can't write, it's all a fantasy: a kind of circling obsession.
Philip Larkin
#92. When your heart starts to feel full again. I love FREE refills, and if a restaurant tries to double charge me, I refuse to write a love poem on their Yelp page.
-Karen Quan and Jarod Kintz
Karen Quan
#93. I often read poetry to 'warm up' before I write.
Amity Gaige
#94. I can recite poetry, but I cannot write it.
Irrfan Khan
#95. I wish I'd been better able to resist the sense of obligation to write some of the poems I did. It's in the nature of commissioned work to be written too much from the side of your mind that knows what it's doing, which dries up the poetry.
Andrew Motion
#96. When Rachel Carson accepted the National Book Award, she said, 'if there is poetry in my book about the sea it is not because I deliberately put it there but because no one could write truthfully about the sea and leave out poetry.
Jim Lynch
#97. I may turn out an intellectual, but I'll never write anything but mediocre poetry.
F Scott Fitzgerald
#98. Nearly everybody is looking for something brave to do. I don't know why people shouldn't write poetry. That's brave.
Robert Frost
#99. I don't want people to write programmatic environmental poems, but I think sustainability should become deeply a part of the consciousness of poetry - an impulse toward compassion, empathy, and social justice.
Alison Hawthorne Deming
#100. Poetry for me is very easy. It's like a lightning bolt. I feel this calling, and the first line of the poem comes into my head, and I just have to go to the page, to the typewriter, to the computer or whatever and write it.
Gioconda Belli
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