Top 75 Poet And Writer Quotes
#1. What an ornament and safeguard is humor! Far better than wit for a poet and writer. It is a genius itself, and so defends from the insanities.
Walter Scott
#2. I'm glad I understand that while language is a gift, listening is a responsibility. (U.S. poet and writer, 1943- )
Nikki Giovanni
#3. As a poet and writer in general I feel very grateful that I can just make a chapbook and that we don't have the expenses of filmmakers.
Ali Liebegott
#4. The Western poet and writer of romance has exactly the same kind of difficulty in comprehending Eastern subjects as you have in comprehending Western subjects.
Lafcadio Hearn
#5. My dad's a photographer, and my sister is a writer and a poet. My little brother is a mandolin player - he's a bluegrass musician. It's always been a part of the family.
Timothy Simons
#6. Every writer should know their target. Aim for the heart ~ hit that and all which follows is sheer ecstasy.
Muse
#7. Like a Rubik's Cube, I have many configurations; Do not just assume that you have "figured" me out, just because you've seen one side.
Andrea L'Artiste
#8. A comic writer should of all others be the least excused for deviating from nature, since it may not be always so easy for a serious poet to meet with the great and the admirable; but life every where furnishes an accurate observer with the ridiculous.
Henry Fielding
#9. Words are heavy in Turkey, and every writer, every poet and every journalist knows that, because of a word, because of a sentence, because of a tweet or even a retweet, you can be sued, you can be demonized by the media and you can even land in prison.
Elif Safak
#10. Novelist and poet David Huddle is a quiet but fabulous writer, and he does adolescent longing better than anyone I know.
Rebecca Makkai
#12. Peter Lucas and I live in Durham but spend a great of time in North Wales, where we have a cottage in the mountains, and in Vermont, USA, with my sister - who is a children's writer married to a poet.
Anne Stevenson
#13. Imagination, which is the Eldorado of the poet and of the novel-writer, often proves the most pernicious gift to the individuals who compose the talkers instead of the writers in society.
Marguerite Gardiner, Countess Of Blessington
#14. To write a poem you must have a streak of arrogance
not in real life I hope. In real life try to be nice. It will save you a hell of a lot of trouble and give you more time to write.
Richard Hugo
#15. Every country has the writers she requires and deserves, which is why Nicaragua, in two hundred years of literacy, has produced one writer-a mediocre poet.
Paul Theroux
#16. A writer should have the precision of a poet and the imagination of a scientist.
Vladimir Nabokov
#17. This poem was meant
to be unwritten.
But I am writing it now
and have thereby changed
destiny.
Kamand Kojouri
#18. When you find a waiter who is a waiter and not an actor, writer, musician or poet, you've found a jewel.
Andre Soltner
#19. I'm not a poet, but I was in the poetry program. And I'm also not much of a nonfiction writer, at least not in the standard sense of nonfiction, nor especially in the way we were thinking about nonfiction back then, in the late 90s.
John D'Agata
#20. My dad was the baby. When he was born they were already successful. They sent him to business school - he probably would have loved to have been a poet or a writer or something, and he was very creative.
Bob Balaban
#21. We aren't suggesting that mental instability or unhappiness makes one a better poet, or a poet at all; and contrary to the romantic notion of the artist suffering for his or her work, we think these writers achieved brilliance in spite of their suffering, not because of it.
Dorianne Laux
#22. You - and I'll venture every third writer in Europe nowadays - fancies himself a poet, when all you're doing is building little towers of words set prettily on a page.
Therese Anne Fowler
#23. Shakespeare, who is probably the greatest writer and poet of the English language, lived in a time that was politically very conservative and it's reflected in his writings.
Alex Cox
#24. Poetry is and should not be explained
It's not a theory not a formula or a set pattern
It's a labyrinth of reflection with no source of image
Yarro Rai
#25. You don't need to be a poet, a performer, a writer, or a journalist to tell your story powerfully. You do, however, need to elevate your language in ways that will bring your story to life clearly and imaginatively for others.
John Capecci And Timothy Cage
#26. Some people make you want to be a better person, and that, for me, is the purest form of love.
Charlotte Eriksson
#27. As I look over my work, I mean every time I look over my early work, I see, yes, I could do that then and then I could do that and that ... That may be the hardest thing for a writer, at least for a poet, to tell what the identity of his work is.
Kenneth Koch
#28. Love is like a magic trick
You know you are getting fooled, but still, you stand in line
And pay to see it again and again.
Yarro Rai
#29. Nobody knows that in reading we are re-living our temptations to be a poet. All readers who have a certain passion for reading, nurture and repress, through reading, the desire to become a writer.
Gaston Bachelard
#30. I always wanted to be an artist, writer and poet since I was seven, and one has to live long enough to evolve as an artist and do one's finest work.
Patti Smith
#31. The French Revolution gave birth to no artists but only to a great journalist, Desmoulins, and to an under-the-counter writer, Sade. The only poet of the times was the guillotine.
Albert Camus
#32. I think about the poet Rainer Maria Rilke who said that it's the questions that move us, not the answers. As a writer, I believe that it's our task, our responsibility, to hold the mirror up to social injustices that we see and to create a prayer of beauty. The questions serve us in that capacity.
Terry Tempest Williams
#33. Those who perceive in themselves ... the artistic vocation as poet, writer, sculptor, painter, musician, and actor feel at the same time an obligation not to waste this talent but to develop it, in order to put it to service of their neighbour and the humanity as a whole.
Pope John Paul II
#34. A country that denies it, citizens, the opportunity to "civil liberties", better health care, schools, roads, electricity and water. Is a country on a brink of no return.
Henry Johnson Jr
#35. Writers, like priests, should have compassion ... and a sensitivity to pain ...
John Geddes
#36. A prose writer gets tired of writing prose, and wants to be a poet. So he begins every line with a capital letter, and keeps on writing prose.
Samuel McChord Crothers
#37. I'm really clear about what my life mission is now. There's no more depression or lethargy, and I feel like I've returned to the athlete I once was. I'm integrating all the parts of me - jock, musician, writer, poet, philosopher - and becoming stronger as a result.
Alanis Morissette
#38. And then it dawned on me that the greatest love stories in the world never have happy endings.
Avijeet Das
#40. 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
#41. Writing, then, was a substitute for myself: if you don't love me, love my writing & love me for my writing. It is also much more: a way of ordering and reordering the chaos of experience.
Sylvia Plath
#42. We are the total of our longings, he had written. But Kevin was a song-writer, not a poet, and he never did use it.
Guy Gavriel Kay
#43. 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
#44. 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
#45. to be a fiction writer, you also need to be a psychologist (understanding people's personalities and intentions), a philosopher (asking big questions about meaning and human nature), and a poet (breathing life into your words and the spaces between them).
Steven James
#47. A robust Liberian middle-class fosters the advancement of social wealth and a well-educated Liberian society.
Henry Johnson Jr
#48. Then, of course, there are those sad occasions when a poet or a writer has not grown, and one has to let them go because they're just not making headway. But we have a very clear personal relationship with the authors.
James Laughlin
#49. His (Islamic astronomer al-Farghani) legacy also endures through the Italian writer and poet Dante (1265-1321), who derived most of the astronomical knowledge he included in his DIVINE COMEDY from the writings of al-Farghani (whom he referred to by his Latin name, Alfraganus).
Jim Al-Khalili
#50. Belief in one's identity as a poet or writer prior to the acid test of publication is as naive and harmless as the youthful belief in one's immortality ... and the inevitable disillusionment is just as painful.
Dan Simmons
#51. Pure poetry in motion. A swift-moving, heartfelt tale of love and loss, two stories intersecting-an d connecting-by magic. Michelle Baker is a born poet, and a born writer. The Canoe is just the start of what I hope to be a long idyllic journey through the love and soul of the human heart.
Trent Zelazny
#53. As you write your novel, you gradually start thinking like some of your characters in it. And at times the writer may lose himself completely in some character.
Avijeet Das
#54. Farber had a huge effect on me as a writer. I don't mean I write like him. Farber is, first of all, a great stylist, a great writer. Anyone can read Manny Farber's film criticism, whether that person is a novelist, a poet, another critic, a historian, and learn a lot about writing by reading him.
Greil Marcus
#55. Because there are hundreds of different ways to say one thing, I, being a writer, songwriter, and poet, speak childishly and incoherently. In speech there is so much to decide in so little time.
Criss Jami
#57. Never the less, at the age of fifteen, having never seen a writer, a poet, a publisher or a magazine editor, and having only the vaguest ideas of procedure, I began working on the profession I had chosen.
Robert E. Howard
#58. Sometimes I wonder what the world would be like if we all got along. If there were no terrorism, Islamophobia, Western hypocrisy, corrupt government in African countries (especially Liberia), sexism, nativism, people like Donald Trump, stereotypes, war, Capitalism, Communism, Marxism and xenophobia.
Henry Johnson Jr
#59. The poet drafts his work as a writer but edits it as a sculptor, with his pen as a chisel and his mind a hammer.
Agona Apell
#60. The Best Thing I love about being a writer and a poet is, I can make up my own words to fit my imagination.
Ocean Crisstopher Poet
#61. A children's writer should, ideally, be a dedicated semi-lunatic, a kind of poet with a marvelous idea, who, preferably, when not committing the marvellous idea to paper, does something else of a quite different kind, so as to acquire new and rich experience.
Joan Aiken
#62. I don't believe a poet has a better hold on truth or morality than a fiction writer has. And I don't think a fiction writer has anything over a journalist. It's all about the good word, properly inserted.
Colum McCann
#63. I always say that a poet loves the world, and the prose writer needs to create an alternative world.
Mary Karr
#64. If you like to read, sometimes it's interesting just to go and see what the reality is, of the word, of the seedy or not so seedy fiction writer, the drunk or sober poet ... Sometimes you can go looking for illumination.
Harold Brodkey
#65. Is the biographer an artist who can and should exist on equal terms with the dramatist, fiction writer and poet? The short and robust answer is, 'Certainly not.'
Tom Paulin
#66. As a writer, I tend to be drawn to marginal people - writers, poet-prophets, seers, eccentrics - who embody the deeper ambivalences of their societies and bear deeper witness to their world than the famous figures we are used to celebrating, or demonizing, in our histories.
Pankaj Mishra
#67. If you ask a twenty-one-year-old poet whose poetry he likes, he might say, unblushing, "Nobody's," In his youth, he has not yet understood that poets like poetry, and novelists like novels; he himself likes only the role, the thought of himself in a hat.
Annie Dillard
#68. Some want to be writers when life permits it. There is no part-time in being a writer. It's an all-in way of living your life through words and feelings scratched out with a pen.
Jason E. Hodges
#69. Digging deep inside you as a writer will damn near kill you at times. But in the end, your words will be true and undeniable for the reader, and that is all that ever really matters in writing.
Jason E. Hodges
#70. 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
#71. I get into beatific cornucopia when I delve into books, coffee, and wanderings!
Avijeet Das
#72. I'm from the beatnik generation, where everybody wanted to be a poet or writer or something. And at that time, I was a jazz critic, and I was always thinking, theorizing about what makes great art or what's important in art.
Harvey Pekar
#73. So I became the wanderer and wandering became my destiny!
Avijeet Das
#74. A poet, any real poet, is simply an alchemist who transmutes his cynicism regarding human beings into an optimism regarding the moon, the stars, the heavens, and the flowers, to say nothing of the spring, love, and dogs.
George Jean Nathan
#75. We need to remember that we are all created creative and can invent new scenarios as frequently as they are needed.
Maya Angelou
