Top 100 On Writing Poetry Quotes
#1. I guess the thing that I'm most proud of is that I kept on writing poetry. I understand that poetry is sort of the source of everything I do. It's the source of my creativity.
Erica Jong
#2. On Writing Poetry: Take everyday words beyond everyday talent and write them alive.
C.J. Heck
#3. She asked me the definition of beauty. So I told her name in my reply!
Avijeet Das
#4. "It almost felt like the dolphin of my heart's desire playing in the ocean of my life." - on writing
Mariam Kobras
#5. I've written poetry since I was a kid. As the years went on, I got into writing stories and screenplays, but I always, always kept up with poetry as well.
Blake Jenner
#6. We are all too fixed on wrecking ourselves rather than bettering ourselves.
Meggie Royer
#7. And now we who are writing women and strange monsters
Still search our hearts to find the difficult answers,
Still hope that we may learn to lay our hands
More gently and more subtly on the burning sands.
May Sarton
#8. On our earth, before writing was invented, before the printing press was invented, poetry flourished. That is why we know that poetry is like bread; it should be shared by all, by scholars and by peasants, by all our vast, incredible, extraordinary family of humanity.
Pablo Neruda
#10. The media has outright lied on me. They reported that I called myself Osama's [Bin Laden] 'sex slave,' apparently unaware that sex slaves aren't allowed to look their master in the eye, write poetry with him or go on hunting excursions with him.
Kola Boof
#11. I don't write poetry or short stories. I don't like to write articles usually. I tend to really only want to be focused on writing novels. It's one of the real advantages I've had over the years. I've only been good at one thing. It helps to be limited.
Markus Zusak
#12. When the poet is in love, he is incapable of writing poetry on love. He has to write when he remembers that he was in love.
Umberto Eco
#13. We have conversations most nights, Sylvia Plath and me. On these cold wintry nights with our coffee mugs in hand, we talk for hours and hours, Sylvia Plath and me!
Avijeet Das
#14. When one writes "the last apple on the tree," or "the one small peach as pink as dawn," one is beginning to deal with particulars - to develop texture ...
Such texture is vital to all poetry. It is what makes the poem an experience, something much more than mere statement.
Mary Oliver
#15. The man is in his work,read it if you want to know about him.
R.M. Engelhardt
#16. If there is anything unique about my writing it is the way that I combine poetry and prose, not just on the level of having a poem here, prose there, but that it really is a true amalgam.
Richard Grossman
#17. You'll have to take me to some museums, he said. He was being the young man on the road, following the sun because gray weather made him suicidal, writing his poetry in his mind in diners and gas station men's rooms across the country.
Francesca Lia Block
#18. Writing poetry is like an opiate. When you get hooked on a blank page in the notebook, that attracts you like fireflies in the night, and you just have to translate your thoughts into words.
I'm addicted to words.
Stjepan Varesevac Cobets
#19. The pen to a writer is like a cigarette to a smoker; they need it to take the edge off.
Kellie Elmore
#20. I am no longer a writer. Just an emotion. An emotion that is unable to stay within its own body, and is therefore, trying to make its way into yours.
Zaeema J. Hussain
#21. Giving these students, teenagers, any form of power over the use of their own words, allowing them to turn everyday raw material into some form of beauty, is a gift beyond measure.
Gloria Ng
#22. When I was writing pretty poor poetry, this girl with midnight black hair told me to go on.
Carl Sandburg
#23. On July 26, 1916, I announced to all my friends in America that from now on I resolved to write no more poems in the classical language, and to begin my experiments in writing poetry in the so-called vulgar tongue of the people.
Hu Shih
#24. Sometimes in composition class, when I have been confronted by someone who simply cannot get the first word written on paper, I give the following advice: Say your essay into a tape recorder and then write it down.
Maria Mazziotti Gillan
#25. My favorite symphony is the silent song of the night!
Avijeet Das
#27. Life can be like a poem that way, with the unexpected appearing in the room, not just on the page.
Susan Goldsmith Wooldridge
#30. Poets, with no sponsors, no agenda, are the truest form of freedom today, bleeding out every drop of themselves for the world to either hate or devour.
Jason E. Hodges
#31. In writing poetry, all of one's attention is focused on some inner voice.
Li-Young Lee
#33. In the writing of poetry we never know anything for sure. We will never know if we have 'trained' or 'practised' enough. We will never be able to say that we have reached grade eight, or that we have left the grades behind and are now embarked on an advanced training.
James Fenton
#34. You made a poet fall in love with the world.
Avijeet Das
#35. To be a poet is a condition, not a profession.
Robert Frost
#36. But it's silly to suggest the writing of poetry is something ethereal, a sort of soul-crashing, devastating emotional experience that wrings you. I have no fancy ideas about poetry ... It doesn't come to you on the wings of a dove. It's something you have to work hard at.
Louise Bogan
#37. He needed some sort of membrane between himself and experience, which, for him, became language.(Jeanette Winterson on T.S.Eliot)
Jeanette Winterson
#38. Women have always been poor, not for two hundred years merely, but from the beginning of time ... Women, then, have not had a dog's chance of writing poetry. That is why I have laid so much stress on money and a room of one's own.
Virginia Woolf
#40. Though we met at the same station,
we were but passing trains;
on parallel lines,
destined to never meet.
Timothy Joshua
#42. Every mother should be a true artist, who knows how to weave into her child's life images of grace and beauty, the true poet capable of writing on the soul of childhood the harmony of love and truth, and teaching it how to produce the grandest of all poems - the poetry of a true and noble life.
Frances Ellen Watkins Harper
#43. Meredith,' interposed Celia, 'makes one of his women, Emilia in England, say that poetry is like talking on tiptoe; like animals in cages, always going to one end and back again.
Harold Frederic
#44. But if a stranger in the train asks me my occupation, I never answer "writer" for fear that he may go on to ask me what I write, and to answer "poetry" would embarrass us both, for we both know that nobody can earn a living simply by writing poetry.
W. H. Auden
#45. How can I tell Bob that my happiness streams from having wrenched a piece out of my life, a piece of hurt and beauty, and transformed it to typewritten words on paper? How can he know I am justifying my life, my keen emotions, my feeling, by turning it into print?
Sylvia Plath
#46. Music resembles poetry, in each
Are nameless graces which no methods teach,
And which a master hand alone can reach.
Alexander Pope
#47. I think of poetry as a very inclusive term. Still, it's interesting that people want to make the distinction. I love the magazine Double Room for that reason (contributors have to write about their ideas on the prose poem/flash fiction).
Matthea Harvey
#48. A single poem, alone
can turn tides
scatter galaxies
and burst forth with rivers
from paradise.
Sanober Khan
#49. Increasingly, those who used to teach and write critical or theoretical texts are writing fiction, poetry and so on; and kinds of texts are being produced that call for budding readers rather different from those who studied literature in the past.
Nicholas Royle
#50. I don't know if you actually get something out of writing poetry. I think poetry is an autonomous muse that decides to come and sit on your couch.
Alice Walker
#51. You may follow the footsteps
The whole day will pass
With you going around in circles
Yet not reaching anywhere at last!
Avijeet Das
#52. On pristine parchment I draw with my skis calligraphic lines of joy, writing poems of movement.
Patricia Robin Woodruff
#53. I was a poet. I had no expectations other than creating a world of art with words that would live on long after I was gone.
Jason E. Hodges
#54. Probably induced by the asthma, I started reading and writing early on, my literary efforts from the age of about nine running chiefly to poetry and plays.
Patrick White
#55. Talent is a faucet. When it is on, one must write. Inspiration is a farce that poets have invented to give themselves importance.
Jean Anouilh
#56. As I read you I fell in love with the holes between your words and I loved you most on the days you could not love yourself.
Jenim Dibie
#57. Poets, on the face of it, have either got to be easier or to write their own notes; readers have either got to take more trouble over reading or cease to regard notes as pretentious and a sign of bad poetry
William Empson
#59. Teaching writing over the years intrudes on your own writing in important ways, taking away some of the excitement of poetry.
Robert Morgan
#60. Words are powerful. Words make a difference. They can create and destroy. They can open doors and close doors. Words can create illusion or magic, love or destruction. ... All those things.
R.M. Engelhardt
#62. They say, poetry is dead. I say, was there ever a time they had a clue of what the state of poetry is?
Jason E. Hodges
#64. The obscure, unexplainable aspect of the writing process is about how some rhymes appear in your head. It often feels more like tuning in to some kind of channel than composing words in your mind.
Sahara Sanders
#65. To die with your boots on while writing poetry is not as glorious as riding a horse down Broadway with a stick of dynamite in your teeth,
Charles Bukowski
#66. 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
#67. I want to read every book that's written
hear every song that was sung
I want to gaze at every cloud
and hold the zing of each fruit on my tongue.
Sanober Khan
#68. 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
#69. Writing essays and teaching composition have helped me immensely in writing poetry, because they've forced me to focus on the structure of ideas.
Aaron Belz
#70. A chronic poet should always be an inveterate nature-lover.
Munia Khan
#71. And there he would lie all day long on the lawn brooding presumably over his poetry, till he reminded one of a cat watching birds, when he had found the word, and her husband said, "Poor old Augustus--he's a true poet," which was high praise from her husband.
Virginia Woolf
#72. The pen, a double-edged mystery: cuts the writer, heals the reader.
Jenim Dibie
#73. 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
#75. After you have pumped your brains for thoughts and verses, there is a better poetry hinted in whistling a tune on your walk.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#76. I was kind of an outcast in school 'cause I always kept to myself and was writing poetry and then going on tour with my brother band all the time, so kids didn't know what to make of me.
Christina Perri
#78. Last night your thin walls invited me to the party next door / reminded me I am a quiet person in a quiet life.
Drew Myron
#79. A visual experience is vitalizing. Whereas to write great poetry, to draw continuously on one's inner life, is not merely exhausting, it is to keep alight a consuming fire.
Kenneth Clark
#80. She loved me deeply, madly and passionately. She knew no other way!
Avijeet Das
#81. Lying in wait, set to pounce on the blank page,
are letters up to no good,
clutches of clauses so subordinate
they'll never let her get away.
From, The Joy of Writing, Wislawa Szymborska
Wislawa Szymborska
#82. I do many kinds of work, and if you forbid me from binding books, from gardening, from writing poetry, from practicing walking meditation, from teaching children, I will be very unhappy. To me, work is pleasant. Pleasant or unpleaseant depends on our way of looking.
Nhat Hanh
#83. We have conversations with each other most nights - Sylvia Plath and me!
Avijeet Das
#84. Up on the Brooklyn Bridge a man is standing in agony, waiting to jump, or waiting to write a poem, or waiting for the blood to leave his vessels because if he advances another foot the pain of his love will kill him.
Henry Miller
#85. Unfortunately, poetry is not born in noise, in crowds, or on a bus. There have to be four walls and the certainty that the telephone will not ring. That's what writing is all about.
Wislawa Szymborska
#86. By and large I think art is made by people who have discipline married to talent in sufficiently large amounts to work even if they don't feel like it. Anybody can get maudlin and decide to write poetry at 11 at night; the question is, can you do it at 8:30 on a Monday morning..?
Clive Barker
#87. Each morning the winds of the city moan and weep with lost souls clinging to hope of reliving the memories of yesterday.
Jason E. Hodges
#88. What is hell to a writer? Hell is being too busy to find the time to write or being unable to find the inspiration. Hell is suddenly finding the words but being away from your notebook or typewriter. Hell is when the verses slip away through your fingers and they never return again.
R.M. Engelhardt
#89. Before you ridicule, remember somebody on a railway platform who seems to be train spotting may actually be writing poetry.
John Hegley
#90. At times you have to fight really hard to remember it. Fight within your mind's dungeons and bring it out alive before it could have been killed and buried forever by the demons living deep down inside your mind's dungeons.
Avijeet Das
#92. One should write only those books from whose absence one suffers. In short: the ones you want on your own desk.
Marina Tsvetaeva
#93. 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
#94. As a writer who writes poetry, nonfiction, and fiction, I think it's important to always maintain a firm grasp on genre and ethics.
Kathleen Rooney
#95. 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
#96. As a writer, a poet, you're not alone in wanting to be alone. Your work is a friendship that never leaves you.
Jason E. Hodges
#97. The last thing one discovers in composing a work is what to put first.
Blaise Pascal
#99. 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
#100. And on the days I couldn't breathe, I learned to paint air.
Jenim Dibie
