Top 100 Poetry Writers Quotes
#1. I give this book 5 Stars and highly recommend it to all fiction, nonfiction, and poetry writers, aspiring writers, bloggers or journalists.
Sunny
#2. A 21st century poet is a woman who can speak her mind and stand upright like a mountain with her convictions, but can adapt like water in an ever changing season without losing her genuine elements.
Roseville Nidea
#3. 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
#4. to be a poet means
to live
with a permanent wound
forever
susceptible
to either
the shade
of the sky
or someone's eyes.
Sanober Khan
#5. The man is in his work,read it if you want to know about him.
R.M. Engelhardt
#6. He Said...
Your garden at dusk
Is the soul of love
Blurred in its beauty
And softly caressing;
I, gently daring
This sweetest confessing,
Say your garden at dusk
Is your soul, My Love.
Anne Spencer
#7. 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
#8. Soho has got to be at its centre. It's got such a history for rock, pop, poetry, jazz, writers, all those things, and I think it should be valued as such, and protected as this centre for bohemia.
Marc Almond
#9. Poems can get
sleepless too
and become
the loneliest thing
in the universe.
Sanober Khan
#10. The pen to a writer is like a cigarette to a smoker; they need it to take the edge off.
Kellie Elmore
#11. may
this poetry
be the home
you will someday
come back to.
Sanober Khan
#12. 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
#13. 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
#14. Logic has rid us of the absurdity of our clothes. That's progress, no irony, only now we are cold. Hale and ill trade bodies with unusual willingness, while in midair souls tangle. The young start out disgusted and Poetry is left to the memo-writers.
Odysseus Elytis
#15. Poetry is a tool for writers to create literature in different forms of expression and messages.
Vanessa M Chattman
#16. She saw poetry where other writers merely saw failure to cope with English.
Alice Walker
#17. Isolation filled with loud silence is a writer's paradise. I wonder how far north toward the Mediterranean must I travel to get there.
Terry A. O'Neal
#18. poetry. i am not writing it.
(make way for me please)
it is my skin. dripping with light.
Sanober Khan
#19. My favorite symphony is the silent song of the night!
Avijeet Das
#20. all the words
all the poems
know
my warm, soft spots.
Sanober Khan
#24. She loved me deeply, madly and passionately. She knew no other way!
Avijeet Das
#25. All poets, all writers are political. They either maintain the status quo, or they say, 'Something's wrong, let's change it for the better.'
Sonia Sanchez
#26. This winter, there will be no voices, no glimpses, no arms.
only the fabric of poetry, to keep me warm.
Sanober Khan
#27. 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
#29. When the modern movement began, starting perhaps with the paintings of Manet and the poetry of Baudelaire and Rimbaud, what distinguished the modern movement was the enormous honesty that writers, painters and playwrights displayed about themselves. The bourgeois novel flinches from such notions.
J.G. Ballard
#30. I don't think poetry is something that can be taught. We can encourage young writers, but what you can't teach them is the very essence of poetry.
Robert Morgan
#31. You may follow the footsteps
The whole day will pass
With you going around in circles
Yet not reaching anywhere at last!
Avijeet Das
#32. Everything you invent is true: you can be sure of that. Poetry is a subject as precise as geometry.
Julian Barnes
#33. I began the way nearly everybody I ever heard of - I began writing poetry. And I find that to be quite usual with writers, their trying their hand at poetry.
Shelby Foote
#34. some words
bring warmth
just by
being
next to each other.
Sanober Khan
#35. She asked me the definition of beauty. So I told her name in my reply!
Avijeet Das
#36. There was no really good true war book during the entire four years of the war. The only true writing that came through during the war was in poetry. One reason for this is that poets are not arrested as quickly as prose writers.
Ernest Hemingway,
#37. We're trying to make something that lasts in language and there's no question that many fiction writers began as poets and it's hard for me to think of any good fiction writers who don't also read poetry.
Edward Hirsch
#38. 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
#39. Sand lines my soul which is filled with the breath of the ocean.
A.D. Posey
#40. We hold on to poetry because it lights a fire in our soul and keeps our bodies warm.
Sanober Khan
#41. The true experimenters are there but no-one hears about them - the critical/review system tends to concentrate on the handful of 'major' writers and their promising successors; bookshops tend not to sell them; publishers don't promote them. It's the same fate as has befallen poetry.
John Scott
#42. When you find yourself writing, reading, or listening the delivery of words when spoken? You know the melody of wordplay. "& I love Wordplay
Elijah Cainaan
#43. Many attempts have been made by writers on art and poetry to define beauty in the abstract, to express it in the most general terms, to find some universal formula for it.
Walter Pater
#44. When I taught at the University of Houston in the Creative Writing program, we required the poets to take workshops in fiction writing, and we required the fiction writers to take workshops in poetry.
Edward Hirsch
#45. I waited for the seasons of love to pass from this cold winter to the summer heat I dreamed of.
Shannon L. Alder
#46. Women are like beautiful flowers. Only when you love them and take good care of them will they fully bloom into the beautiful flowers that they are.
Avijeet Das
#47. That is what all poets do: they talk to themselves out loud; and the world overhears them
George Bernard Shaw
#48. Poetry creates the myth, the prose writer draws its portrait.
Jean-Paul Sartre
#49. There is more of a nation's politics to be got out of its poetry than out of all its systematic writers on public affairs and constitutions.
Woodrow Wilson
#50. It is something to have gazed on the constellated white,
felt it running from the eyes and the pores: the salt of love.
It is something to have whispered wild thank-yous
in the only ways we know how.
Bryana Johnson
#51. Poetry is a process of getting back to the unconscious. Hence, I am always writing-even when I'm not facing the white space. I feel writers are like reservoirs of images. We take in what is around us.
Yusef Komunyakaa
#52. And truly Philosophy is but sophisticated poetry. Whence do those ancient writers derive all their authority but from the poets?
Michel De Montaigne
#53. my poetry is merely a body.
you are the soul in my words.
Sanober Khan
#54. I write to forget the days that broke me into a million nights.
Jenim Dibie
#55. 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
#56. there is a difference between
loneliness and solitude,
one will empty you and
one will fill you.
you have the power to choose.
AVA.
#57. Poetry keeps me
in a highly drunken state
of divinity.
Sanober Khan
#58. From the beginnings of literature, poets and writers have based their narratives on crossing borders, on wandering, on exile, on encounters beyond the familiar. The stranger is an archetype in epic poetry, in novels. The tension between alienation and assimilation has always been a basic theme.
Jhumpa Lahiri
#59. i am infinitely yearning
brimming
and overflowing
in words
i discover
it's another way
for me
to be in tears.
Sanober Khan
#60. 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
#61. The characters in my novels are my own unrealised possibilities. That is why I am equally fond of them all and equally horrified by them. Each one has crossed a border that I myself have circumvented.
Milan Kundera
#62. To many writers and thinkers, though not to all, another text is, or can be, the most naked and charged of life-forces ... The concept of allusion or analogue is totally inadequate. To Dante these other texts are the organic context of identity. They are as directly about life as life is about them.
George Steiner
#63. Not that the writers weren't good. I believe in those books and those writers very much. It's just that in the climate it's really hard to keep the lights on and the doors open when you're selling poetry and literature that appeals to a fringe audience.
Henry Rollins
#64. A chronic poet should always be an inveterate nature-lover.
Munia Khan
#65. All writers know that on some golden mornings they are touched by the wand; they are on intimate terms with poetry and cosmic truth. I have experienced these moments myself. Their lesson is simple: It's a total illusion. And the danger in the illusion is that you will wait for those moments.
John Kenneth Galbraith
#66. 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
#67. Poets and writers who are in love with the superlative all want to do more than they can.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#68. Poets will never be the highest-paid writers in the world. Instead, poetry will go on cutting a hand-made path through the mass-market insanity. For me, anyway, that path is the one that leads to the Chapel of the Grail.
Jeanette Winterson
#69. The pen, a double-edged mystery: cuts the writer, heals the reader.
Jenim Dibie
#70. Poetry has saved me on occasions when people couldn't.
Sanober Khan
#71. Translated poetry filled the no-man's-land between my own work and other writers', and I found this fascinating to explore.
Edwin Morgan
#72. Songs. Books. Poetry. Paintings. These things reveal truth. I believe lies and truth are tangled together.
Brenda Sutton Rose
#73. I was intoxicated by the romantic poetry of our great writers. I arranged the world according to my private use, looking at it through the poems I had devoured.
Wladyslaw Stanislaw Reymont
#74. France is not poetic; she even feels, in fact, a congenital horror of poetry. Among the writers who use verse, those whom she will always prefer are the most prosaic.
Charles Baudelaire
#75. 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
#76. everything i know about love
is that it hurts
and is almost always never returned
the way you want it to.
but i have hope
because i do not know everything.
AVA.
#77. i write
because
it is
the only way
i can
reach you.
Sanober Khan
#78. 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
#79. A man does not become a real man by showing his physical domination over women. A man becomes a real man by loving, respecting and protecting women.
Avijeet Das
#80. Love doesn't make you a poet; it makes you poetry.
Yarro Rai
#81. 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
#82. It is kind of ridiculous that a poet is expected to live in the real world.
Sanober Khan
#83. Our most famous writers are Faulkner and Eudora Welty and Flannery O'Connor. It would make sense that the poetry would reflect some of those same values, some of the same techniques.
Robert Morgan
#84. 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
#85. I called it a baptism in flaming ink that forced me to shed my shyness about recognizing myself as a poet and to accept the fact that life had never given me any choice in the matter. And then I had to discover exactly what that meant.
Aberjhani
#86. 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
#87. I would be happier if people who went through MFA programs also were already, by then, deeply committed readers of poetry because we need readers of poetry as much as writers of poetry.
Edward Hirsch
#88. 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
#89. We have conversations with each other most nights - Sylvia Plath and me!
Avijeet Das
#90. When words lose their meaning, physical force takes over.
from an essay for Writers by Nancy Crampton
W. H. Auden
#92. 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
#93. How....will I ever truly depict you?
You're perfect, my writing isn't.
Sanober Khan
#94. All writers are manipulative liars.
Jack O. Savage, The Poet
Hunter S. Jones
#95. We inhale life and exhale words. that's just what writers' do
Terry A. O'Neal
#96. Writing is a kind of revenge against circumstance too: bad luck, loss, pain. If you make something out of it, then you've no longer been bested by these events.
Louise Gluck
#97. She gave me hugs that were like oxygen to a dying man and uplifted my soul!
Avijeet Das
#98. 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
#99. Why do writers, say, give up a job in economics and decide to write poetry? Or, why do they give up a job in a bank and decide to paint, like Krishan Khanna? They want to convey something.
Vikram Seth
#100. A writer will divine a metaphor from a pattern on a dress, or a gesture, because sunsets have been done before.
Brandi L. Bates
