Top 100 Poets Writers Quotes
#1. When you educate yourself about clitoredectomies, infibulation, forced prostitution, rape as a war tactic, patriarchal religions, women painters, filmmakers, poets, writers, activists, politicians, sex-industry workers, historians, archelogoists and musicians, that's self-protection.
Inga Muscio
#2. My father, George, has also affected the choices in my life regarding films. I like films that take chances or say something different or experiment. Growing up with him, I was surrounded by different artists - not just actors or film-makers but cartoonists, poets, writers.
Leonardo DiCaprio
#3. When one would ask most modern artists, poets, writers and other status quo fueled semi-intellectuals who Machiavelli was - was that an opera singer?
Martijn Benders
#4. 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
#5. I think hard times are coming. We will need writers who can remember freedom. Poets, visionaries, the realists of a larger reality.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#6. 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
#7. Novelists and poets are the landscape artists and portrait painters; academic writers are the people with big paint sprayers who repaint your basement.
Paul J. Silvia
#8. may
this poetry
be the home
you will someday
come back to.
Sanober Khan
#9. Poets and writers don't live either for money or for fame. And even without any recognition for their work they keep on writing!
Avijeet Das
#10. I'm a line-maker. I think that's what makes poets different from prose-writers. That's the main way. We think, not just in sentences the way prose writers do but also in lines. So we're doing these two things at the same time.
Billy Collins
#11. Why do I write? Out of fear. Out of fear that the memory of the people I write about might go lost. Out of fear that the memory of myself might get lost. Or even just to be shielded by a story, to slip inside a story and stop being recognizable, controllable, subject to blackmail.
Fabrizio De Andre
#12. Sometimes the greatest love is not found in the dramatic scenes that poets and writers immortalize. Often, the greatest manifestations of love are the simple acts of kindness and caring we extend to those we meet along the path of life.
Joseph B. Wirthlin
#13. For purposes of marketing, writers are designated as poets, novelists, or something else. But writing is about matchmaking, an attempt to marry sensations with apt words.
Teju Cole
#14. Artists - musicians, painters, writers, poets - always seem to have had the most accurate perception of what is really going on around them, not the official version or the popular perception of contemporary life.
Billy Joel
#15. He would write and write. He would make wonderful things happen. Some of it would be true. All of it would be true. Most of it would be true.
Kate DiCamillo
#16. poetry. i am not writing it.
(make way for me please)
it is my skin. dripping with light.
Sanober Khan
#17. On Memorial Day, I don't want to only remember the combatants. There were also those who came out of the trenches as writers and poets, who started preaching peace, men and women who have made this world a kinder place to live.
Eric Burdon
#18. There is a line from the Marina Tsvetaeva poem I'm so fond of: "In this most Christian of worlds/ All poets are Jews." What she means is that writers and artists are outside the normal flow of daily life, the normal flow of society in general.
Paul Auster
#19. I read a lot. I liked a tremendous number of poets and writers. The person whose work I liked the most was Joyce.
Grace Paley
#20. A lot of artists start out as failed poets, then move on to being failed short-story writers before they finally break through to the big time and become failed novelists.
Gary Reilly
#22. 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
#24. Of necessity, we made the discovery that it is easier to turn poets into business journalists than to turn bookkeepers into writers.
Henry R. Luce
#25. There are some fine books and essays about that. Lewis Hyde has written about alcoholism and poets and the role that society gives its writers - encouraging them to die.
Sharon Olds
#26. We hold on to poetry because it lights a fire in our soul and keeps our bodies warm.
Sanober Khan
#27. A cool & diversified version of a mix tape. The BreakBeat Poets is a thorough and complete summation of Golden Era writers who continue to build the scene of literary and performance poetry.
Chance The Rapper
#28. I have learned so much from working with other poets, travelling and reading with them, spending days discussing poems in progress. There is the sense that we are all, as writers, part of something which is more powerful than any of us.
Helen Dunmore
#29. Most writers - poets in especial - prefer having it understood that they compose by a species of fine frenzy - an ecstatic intuition - and would positively shudder at letting the public take a peep behind the scenes ...
Edgar Allan Poe
#30. During the 20th century, Chechnya was written about by local poets and novelists, as well as writers from Russia and Central Asia, but very little is available in English translation.
Anthony Marra
#31. Lyrics have to be underwritten. That's why poets generally make poor lyric writers because the language is too rich. You get drowned in it.
Stephen Sondheim
#32. Yes, you can feel very alone as a poet and you sometimes think, is it worth it? Is it worth carrying on? But because there were other poets, you became part of a scene. Even though they were very different writers, it made it easier because you were together.
Roger McGough
#33. How something important happens is the business of historians and newspapers, the effect it has is the business of philosophers and writers and especially poets.
Karl Shapiro
#34. we talk of plans that are going to happen.
we talk of the future, as if we know we will last.
there is a sort of comfort in that.
AVA.
#35. Artistes breathe and dream creativity!
Avijeet Das
#36. The great leaders of business, industry, finance, and the great artists, musicians, poets, and writers became great, because they developed the faculty of creative imagination.
Napoleon Hill
#38. When it comes to writers and poets, for me it's Vinicius de Moraes. He's one of the greatest lyricists ever.
Ben Harper
#39. Most people don't have real friends. You have people in your life waiting for opportunities to see what YOU can do for them.
Brandi L. Bates
#40. I think writers are the most narcissistic people. Well, I musn't say this, I like many of them, a great many of my friends are writers.
Sylvia Plath
#41. Everything you invent is true: you can be sure of that. Poetry is a subject as precise as geometry.
Julian Barnes
#42. some words
bring warmth
just by
being
next to each other.
Sanober Khan
#43. 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,
#44. 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
#45. 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
#46. Literature remains alive only if we set ourselves immeasurable goals, far beyond all hope of achievement. Only if poets and writers set themselves tasks that no one else dares imagine will literature continue to have a function.
Italo Calvino
#47. Great writers experience their dreams. They put them on paper, where others can read about them.
Ellen J. Barrier
#48. 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
#49. I waited for the seasons of love to pass from this cold winter to the summer heat I dreamed of.
Shannon L. Alder
#50. That is what all poets do: they talk to themselves out loud; and the world overhears them
George Bernard Shaw
#51. It is very difficult to win. It's not in my script.
Louise Gluck
#52. The pen, a double-edged mystery: cuts the writer, heals the reader.
Jenim Dibie
#53. The 1960s was a period when writers in the West began to be aware of the extraordinary eloquence and popular attraction of the Russian poets such as Yevtushenko and Voznesensky - oppositional figures who could draw crowds. The Russian poets recited from memory as a matter of course.
James Fenton
#55. People have many cruel expectations from writers. People expect novelists to live on a hill with three kids and a spouse, people expect children's story writers to never have sex, and people expect all great poets to be dead. And these are all very difficult expectations to fulfill, I think.
C. JoyBell C.
#56. Only the writers can change or fix the past by going back to edit old works
Munia Khan
#57. I was joking earlier when I said that all writers are manic depressives, but it's a joke with a lot of truth behind it. For fiction writers and poets, too, there's something wrong with you and you do this art as a way of correcting it or addressing it in some way.
T.C. Boyle
#58. Poets are regarded as handicapped writers whose work must be treated with a tender condescension, such as one accords the athletic achievements of basketball players confined to wheelchairs.
Thomas M. Disch
#59. A chronic poet should always be an inveterate nature-lover.
Munia Khan
#60. And truly Philosophy is but sophisticated poetry. Whence do those ancient writers derive all their authority but from the poets?
Michel De Montaigne
#61. 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
#62. Poets and writers who are in love with the superlative all want to do more than they can.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#63. 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
#64. Writers, particularly poets, always feel exiled in some way - people who don't exactly feel at home, so they try to find a home in language.
Natasha Trethewey
#65. Copywriters, journalists, mainstream authors, ghostwriters, bloggers and advertising creatives have as much right to think of themselves as good writers as academics, poets, or literary novelists.
Sara Sheridan
#66. Men saw the stars at the edge of the sea They thought great thoughts about liberty Poets wrote down words that did fit Writers wrote books Thinkers thought about it.
Van Morrison
#67. Poetry has saved me on occasions when people couldn't.
Sanober Khan
#68. The writing talent of Edinburgh is textured - we have poets, novelists, non-fiction writers, dramatists and more.
Sara Sheridan
#69. Poets of course are even more unpredictable than other writers, overwhelmed as they are by the moment they inhabit and finding it difficult to connect yesterday with tomorrow.
Karl Shapiro
#71. All poets and story tellers alive today make a single brotherhood; they are engaged in a single work, picturing our human life. Whoever pictures life as he sees it, reassembles in his own way the details of existence which affect him deeply, and so creates a spiritual world of his own.
Haniel Long
#72. GIVING - Applied tithing is so rewarding. When you give away your time, talent, and treasures you create a huge shift in your prosperity consciousness. So start where you are as you reach for where it is you want to be.
Lisa Washington
#73. I think poets are much more dramatic, more theatrical than fiction writers.
Francine Prose
#74. This is the nature of love." Vashet said. "To attempt to describe it will drive a woman mad. This is what keeps poets scribbling endlessly away. If one could pin it to paper all complete, the others would lay down their pens. But it cannot be done.
Patrick Rothfuss
#75. 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.
#76. It sounds old-fashioned to say, but we have some kind of purpose for being here, not poets or writers, but all of us humans.
Pattiann Rogers
#77. When I got to Grinnell College, I was part of the black turtleneck sweater and Camel cigarette crowd of poets and writers.
Peter Coyote
#78. It's the first thing I tell my students: If you could understand, really understand, that no one needs to read your work, then your writing would improve vastly by the time we meet in this classroom again.
Dan Barden
#79. Anyone who wants to be a writer should, if given the opportunity, hang out with "real writers," that is, poets or writers who are lions in literature, semi-lions, or published authors.
Kirby Wright
#80. One of the most intuitive nature writers of our recently past century, Peter Matthiessen, lends a poets voice to the desperate effort to save the tiger.
Ron Franscell
#81. Love doesn't make you a poet; it makes you poetry.
Yarro Rai
#82. It is kind of ridiculous that a poet is expected to live in the real world.
Sanober Khan
#83. 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
#84. I want to be one of those people, be they writers, poets, musicians, who leaves clues for the next generation. The really good people leave clues that help feed the human race. That's my aspiration.
Julian Casablancas
#85. When younger writers and poets, musicians and painters are weakened by a stemming of funds, they come to me saddened, not as full of dreams and excitement and ideas. I am then weakened and diminished, and made less rich.
Maya Angelou
#86. i write
because
it is
the only way
i can
reach you.
Sanober Khan
#87. How....will I ever truly depict you?
You're perfect, my writing isn't.
Sanober Khan
#88. When I was 18, I lived in Greenwich Village, New York, for nine months. At that time, I wanted to change the world, not through architecture, but through painting. I lived the artist's life, mingling with poets and writers, and working as a waiter. I was intrigued by the aliveness of the city.
Christian De Portzamparc
#89. We have conversations with each other most nights - Sylvia Plath and me!
Avijeet Das
#90. 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
#91. A lot of artists use memories. A lot of prose writers, a lot of poets, a lot of songwriters, refer back to something. Generally it's all you've got, unless you're brilliant and can write totally in the now.
Paul McCartney
#92. A writer will divine a metaphor from a pattern on a dress, or a gesture, because sunsets have been done before.
Brandi L. Bates
#93. Science will ... produce the data ... , but never the
full meaning. For perceiving real significance, we
shall need ... most of all the brains of poets, [and]
also those of artists, musicians, philosophers,
historians, writers in general.
Lewis Thomas
#94. The only advice [for new writers and poets] I can offer is to be yourself: not the self someone else wants you to be, but the self you are. Enjoy yourself and your life. But most of all travel and eat. That's how we learn.
Nikki Giovanni
#95. I write to forget the days that broke me into a million nights.
Jenim Dibie
#96. 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
#97. i am infinitely yearning
brimming
and overflowing
in words
i discover
it's another way
for me
to be in tears.
Sanober Khan
#98. If poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world, science fiction writers are its court jesters. We are Wise Fools who can leap, caper, utter prophecies, and scratch ourselves in public. We can play with Big Ideas because the garish motley of our pulp origins make us seem harmless.
Bruce Sterling
#99. 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
#100. Eliot admitted later on that science-fiction writers couldn't write for sour apples, but he declared that it didn't matter. He said they were poets just the same, since they were more sensitive to important changes than anybody who was writing well.
Kurt Vonnegut
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