Top 100 Quotes About Poetry And Writing
#1. I don't think there's any essential difference, at least for me, between writing poetry and writing prose.
Jorge Luis Borges
#2. I really enjoy English and poetry and writing classes.
Taylor Momsen
#3. With poetry and writing, the question isn't "do you know the right words?".
The real question is, "can you make words from the unwordable, chisel blocks of raw silence into shapes and touch our souls?
Jacob Nordby
#4. 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
#5. 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
#6. The nerds are my favourite sort of boys - any guy with a passion - whether it be physics or film or writing or poetry even, I think it's super sweet and it's very attractive for a female.
Teresa Palmer
#7. 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
#8. I'm a poet who practices Zen. And it's not, I'm somebody who practices Zen who writes poetry. There's no separation for me.
Sam Hamill
#9. I had feelings that I didn't know what to do with, and I felt better when I started writing them. I thought of it as poetry. I did notice girls really liked it. Better than football. They liked the combination.
Edward Hirsch
#10. Poetry and prose are of equal importance to me as a reader, and there doesn't seem to be much difference in my own writing.
Kevin Powers
#12. I'll be writing as long as I can hold a pen in my curled, crimped arthritic hands and then I'll dictate it, if it comes to that. They'll have to pry my pen out of my cold, dead fingers - and even then, I'll fight 'em for it. Guaranteed.
Wanda Lea Brayton
#13. I got a bit obsessed with the whole English language and was writing journals and poetry. I've always been intrigued about psychology and philosophy and how people's minds work.
Lara Pulver
#14. When you are writing literary writing, you are communicating something subtextual with emotions and poetry. The prose has to have a voice; it's not just typing. It takes a while to get that voice.
Joyce Carol Oates
#15. And so I've written everything down, too afraid of my demons and what they may say, the doubt that eats at me from the inside. Too afraid that I'll forget and it'll all be a madwoman's dream.
Nadege Richards
#16. I entered a poem in a poetry contest around 1987, and the poem won and I received $1,000 for it. That made me realize that maybe what I was writing was worth reading to people. After that, for some reason, I turned to novels and I've written mainly novels ever since.
Sharon Creech
#17. 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
#18. I did not believe political directives could be successfully applied to creative writing ... not to poetry or fiction, which to be valid had to express as truthfully as possible the individual emotions and reactions of the writer.
Langston Hughes
#19. The most ignorant person, at a reasonable charge, and with a little bodily labour, might write books in philosophy, poetry, politics, laws, mathematics, and theology, without the least assistance from genius or study.
Jonathan Swift
#20. He who writes poetry is not a poet. He whose poetry has become his life, and who has made his life his poetry - it is he who is a poet.
Subramanya Bharathi
#21. Go home and write / a page tonight. / And let that page come out of you - / Then, it will be true.
Langston Hughes
#22. 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
#23. If a man comes to the door of poetry untouched by the madness of the Muses, believing that technique alone will make him a good poet, he and his sane compositions never reach perfection, but are utterly eclipsed by the performances of the inspired madman.
Socrates
#24. I've written some poetry, but ... songs have to be more poetic, and I've really gotten to this non-poetic sort of writing.
Mike Gordon
#25. In writing, I want to be remembered for telling good stories in beautiful and powerful language, using the poetry of words to reflect the thematic concerns of compelling stories.
Kim Edwards
#26. I thought to spend my declining years writing poetry and teaching - but that won't pay the Bergdorf's bill. I think I'll move to somewhere life is cheaper.
Erica Jong
#27. 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
#28. And inasmuch as the bridge is a symbol of all such poetry as I am interested in writing it is my present fancy that a year from now I'll be more contented working in an office than ever before.
Hart Crane
#29. 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
#30. I feel often very close to the ecstasy and anguish which lie at the very heart of poetry - I am writing a lot.
May Sarton
#31. 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
#32. Literary poetry in a painter is something special, and is neither illustration nor the translation of writing by form.
Paul Gauguin
#33. I began writing early - very, very early ... I was already writing short stories for the radio and selling poems to poetry and art festivals; I was involved in school plays; I wrote essays, so there was no definite moment when I said, 'Now I'm a writer.' I've always been a writer.
Wole Soyinka
#34. 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
#35. Our sense of what American English is has upended our relationship to articulateness, our approach to writing, and how (and whether) we impart it to the young, our interest in poetry, and our conception of what it is, and even our response to music and how we judge it.
John McWhorter
#36. People should be stopped from writing poetry. There's far too much of it. And if they're any good, they'll go ahead anyways.
Clive James
#37. 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
#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. I published only in academic journals in philosophy until I was in my 40s, but I had been writing fiction and poetry my whole adult life - without ever once trying to publish it, and rarely letting anyone read it.
Cheryl Mendelson
#40. There are three good things in this world. One is to read poetry, another is to write poetry, and the best of all is to live poetry.
Rupert Brooke
#41. One writes because one has been touched by the yearning for and the despair of ever touching the Other.
Charles Simic
#42. and a day spent working for money is wasted while a day spent writing poetry is wasted but more honest.
Tim Lane
#43. There's more substance in my prose and my poetry than in all my films together. Writing is a more direct way of expressing yourself because, in cinema, you always have finances, organization, actors, technical apparatus and all that stuff coming in between.
Werner Herzog
#44. The idea that a poem was a made thing stayed with me, and I decided then that I wanted to be an artist, not just a diarist. So I put myself through a kind of apprenticeship in writing poetry, and I understood even then that my practice as a poet was deeply related to my reading.
Edward Hirsch
#45. I no longer feel I'll be dead by thirty; now it's sixty. I suppose these deadlines we set for ourselves are really a way of saying we appreciate time, and want to use all of it. I'm still
writing, I'm still writing poetry, I still can't explain why, and I'm still running out of time.
Margaret Atwood
#46. I'm a poet. I'm just a renaissance man in my heart. I can build shelves and I can write poetry.
Anthony Mackie
#47. I didn't come in and say: "I'm a singer." I came into the band as a second guitar player and a vocalist, but not the songwriter. I had been writing poetry for years, so I sort of had the nature of the words. I felt like no one else could sing my lyrics, so I took a crack at it.
Paul Banks
#48. I do love writing prose interspersed with the poetry of other people. Their rhythms break into my prose and create a connection.
Pattiann Rogers
#49. The short story seems like the best of all possible worlds. I do feel it is closer to writing poetry than to writing a novel, with its requirements of concentration and economy.
James Lasdun
#50. Well - I started writing - probably in the early 60s and by say '65-'66 I had read most of the poetry that had been published - certainly in the 20 years prior to that.
Robert Adamson
#51. 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
#52. Poetry aims for an economy of truth - loose and useless words bust be discarded, and I found that these loose and useless words were not separate from loose and useless thoughts. Poetry was not simply the transcription of notions - beautiful writing rarely is.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#53. 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.
#54. You've got to love libraries. You've got to love books. You've got to love poetry. You've got to love everything about literature. Then, you can pick the one thing you love most and write about it.
Ray Bradbury
#55. But writing poems and letters doesn't seem to do much good.
Sylvia Plath
#56. 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
#57. I've read a lot of war writing, even World War I writing, the British war poetry of Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves's memoir "Goodbye to All That," and a civilian memoir "Testament of Youth" by Vera Brittain .
George Packer
#58. People cannot stand the saddest truth I know about the very nature of reading and writing imaginative literature, which is that poetry does not teach us how to talk to other people: it teaches us how to talk to ourselves.
Harold Bloom
#59. The writing of poetry is a chancy business, it's currency solitude and loss, its tools coffee and too much wine, its hours midnight, dawn, and dusk, and unlike other trade the hours asleep are not time off.
Keith Miller
#60. 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
#61. i am infinitely yearning
brimming
and overflowing
in words
i discover
it's another way
for me
to be in tears.
Sanober Khan
#62. Creativity is the result of a struggle between vitality and form. As anyone who has tried to write a sonnet or scan poetry, is aware, the form ideally do not take away from the creativity but may add to it.
Rollo May
#63. I've been writing since I was sixteen. At first, I wrote mostly short stories and poetry. The first thing I ever had published was a poem about a football game. It was printed in my local newspaper.
Jerry Spinelli
#64. I've been writing poems since I was sixteen. Back then, poems were an obvious release for all the frustrations and anxieties associated with adolescence. Mostly, they were a way for me to impress girls, even though I never remember any girls being impressed.
Tony Magistrale
#65. Following the invention of writing, the special form of heightened language, characteristic of the oral tradition and a collective society, gave way to private writing. Records and messages displaced the collective memory. Poetry was written and detached from the collective festival.
Harold Innis
#66. Gradually I find that my whole soul is merging itself into this business of writing, and especially of writing poetry. I am going to try it; and am going to test, in the most rigid way I know, the awful question whether it is my vocation.
Sidney Lanier
#67. All that is required of you is an open mind and a little patience.
F.K. Preston
#68. 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
#69. If we were to understand how important it is to say something and say it well, maybe we wouldn't write a single word, but that would be tragic.
Dejan Stojanovic
#70. I started writing poetry when I was six. I had this teacher who didn't believe the poems I'd bring in were mine because they were dark and sad. But I wrote about what I experienced in my childhood.
Mariah Carey
#71. When you recite you're giving a performance, in the way that an actor or a singer performs, and some poets are not interested in doing that, maybe because they're writing for a readership as opposed to an audience, or because they see poetry as a very private art.
James Arthur
#72. . . .poetry by Eliot. There's a lulling thing in his voice that makes me feel as if a spell has been cast that shall wake us all so that we might fly out of the mirror and speak to each other clearly at last.
Louisa Hall
#73. The greatest happiness is a quiet kind. It's the tender understanding that we're living in a very strange place full of strange creatures. And there's quite a bit of wonder in that.
F.K. Preston
#74. Let the snake wait under
his weed
and the writing
be of words, slow and quick, sharp
to strike, quiet to wait,
sleepless.
through metaphor to reconcile
the people and the stones.
Compose. (No ideas
but in things) Invent!
Saxifrage is my flower that splits
the rocks.
William Carlos Williams
#76. She knew the intensity of adolescence, and knew no cure for it except growing up. And then one has age and experience, and mourns the loss of intensity. Maybe it's why musicians and mathmaticians are said to peak young-poetry needs the fire of an unbounded universe.
Sara Paretsky
#77. 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
#78. I love contemporary poetry because it moves between what we call poetry and what we call philosophy. It joins these fields and makes writing more natural, as in how it is lived in the person. We don't separate thinking from feeling in real life, so why should we separate it in writing?
Etel Adnan
#79. Reading haiku is as much an art as writing it. The reader needs to pause and listen to the silences, to feel the spaces between the words, and to journey into the depths of many multi-colored worlds.
Harley King
#81. 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
#82. 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
#83. We can live quiet, apparently sedate lives if we express our wildness by risking and leaping in our writing...The strangest, most far-out renegade part of ourselves can be expressed in a poem while we sit quietly in our kitchen or bedroom. This can save our lives
Susan Goldsmith Wooldridge
#84. 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
#85. I don't think American poetry has gotten any better in the past 35 years. Oddly enough, creative writing programs seem to have been good for fiction, and I would not have predicted that.
Robert Morgan
#86. 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
#87. Be still my hand and let the words write themselves upon my heart. Be still my heart and let your pages be filled in silence.
Cristen Rodgers
#88. 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
#89. I have a deep and ongoing love of Iceland, particular the landscape, and when writing 'Burial Rites,' I was constantly trying to see whether I could distill its extraordinary and ineffable qualities into a kind of poetry.
Hannah Kent
#90. How....will I ever truly depict you?
You're perfect, my writing isn't.
Sanober Khan
#91. If I were to choose between the power of writing a poem and the ecstasy of a poem unwritten, I would choose the ecstasy. It is better poetry.
Kahlil Gibran
#92. In a notable family called Stein
There were Gertrude, and Ep, and then Ein.
Gert's writing was hazy,
Ep's statues were crazy,
And nobody understood Ein.
Bennett Cerf
#93. And on the days I couldn't breathe, I learned to paint air.
Jenim Dibie
#94. I can't picture myself starting out aiming to do anything or having much of an agenda.I think in writing a poem, I'm making some tonal adjustments, and it took me a long time to allow anything like fun into my poetry.
Billy Collins
#95. 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
#96. The thing I've learned writing my book is that everyone has the potential to be a poet, and all of our lives are epic.
Jonathan Heatt
#97. You know, I can imagine not writing a novel and writing poetry only.
Vikram Seth
#98. Just getting something to work usually means writing reams of code fast, like a Stephen King novel, but making it maintainable and high-quality code that really expresses the ideas well, is like writing poetry. Art is taking away.
Erik Naggum
#99. The last thing one discovers in composing a work is what to put first.
Blaise Pascal
#100. I once tried hawking my own book around the pubs in the hope that, like the Salvation Army, I too could sell to the cerebrally relaxed. It was a disaster. I had beer thrown over me for being a) a nuisance, b) not as good as Wordsworth and c) a nancy for writing poetry in the first place.
Peter Finch
