Quotes About Writers And Poets

#1. 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

#2. 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

#3. With enough use, practice, and honing of skill, words were the weapons of choice used by exceptional writers and poets. Minds can be changed, hearts can be lost and broken, souls can be surrendered given the right words.

Penny Reid

#4. Intellectuals, academics, writers and poets were an important force in the early groups of volunteers. They had the means to get to Spain and were accustomed to travelling, whereas very few workers had left British shores.

Bill Alexander

#5. I think Lindsay Kemp really introduced me to the work of Jean Genet, and through that, I kind of kept re-educating myself about other prose writers and poets.

David Bowie

#6. I actually very rarely see comedy myself, and although I admire the work of some comics, it does come from all over, so I'll get a charge out of some fiction writers and poets.

Dylan Moran

#7. Anyone can express himself or herself, but what writers and poets want to do in their work, more than simply express themselves, is communicate.

Raymond Carver

#8. When it comes to writers and poets, for me it's Vinicius de Moraes. He's one of the greatest lyricists ever.

Ben Harper

#9. 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

#10. 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

#11. 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

#12. 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

#13. 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

#14. 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

#15. 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

#16. 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

#17. 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

#18. That is what all poets do: they talk to themselves out loud; and the world overhears them

George Bernard Shaw

#19. 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

#20. 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

#21. 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

#22. 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

#23. 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

#24. 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

#25. 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

#26. When the others were picked up and walked home by friends or fathers or best friend's sisters,
I was the kid in a grey hoodie, walking with the poets, the singers, the thinkers, and I was not alone.

Charlotte Eriksson

#27. Artistes breathe and dream creativity!

Avijeet Das

#28. 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

#29. 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

#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. 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

#32. 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

#33. There is no moral to my song,
I praise no right, I blame no wrong;
I tell of things that I have seen,
I show the man that I have been
As simply as a poet can
Who knows himself poet and man.

Thomas MacDonagh

#34. And thus it was that I started to wonder why Robert Burns is so important to us. We have other poets, and other writers, and other heroes, yet we do not afford them the veneration that we afford to Robert Burns.

Len G. Murray

#35. It may be that hidden in the poets and writers we love best is a vital clue about the heaven we are aiming for; that we should stay with and return often and with confidence to those lines and images that have most inspired us, even from our childhood.

Malcolm Guite

#36. We will read books together inside the blanket and stay warm. And keep writing poetry in our respective journals. Time will fly but we will still remain inside the blanket forever.

Avijeet Das

#37. It is possible that scientists, poets, painters and writers are all members of the same family of people whose gift it is by nature to take those things which we call common-place and to 're-present' them to us - the world - in such ways that our self-imposed limitations are expanded.

Gary Zukav

#38. In the Western tradition, the first writers were teachers and historians, vastly traveled, who spiced their reports with fantasies. They were also poets who sang and entertained prince and pauper.

F. Sionil Jose

#39. That is many poets don't know how to tell a story and they don't have a sense of how to put things in order to tell a story and we thought the poets could learn from fiction writers something about developing a character over time who wasn't just you and also creating a narrative structure.

Edward Hirsch

#40. Those are dangerous thoughts to have, brother." He smirks at me. "Don't you know, dear sister? Poets and writers, dreamers and artist, we are the most dangerous bunch of the lot." ***

Karpov Kinrade

#41. I'm trying to stay open to the idea that the Internet is not the evil foe of publishing but the handmaiden that will turn out to be a blessing for poets and writers.

Joan Larkin

#42. 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

#43. 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.

#44. 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

#45. 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

#46. 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

#47. 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

#48. The writing talent of Edinburgh is textured - we have poets, novelists, non-fiction writers, dramatists and more.

Sara Sheridan

#49. Poets and writers who are in love with the superlative all want to do more than they can.

Friedrich Nietzsche

#50. 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

#51. And truly Philosophy is but sophisticated poetry. Whence do those ancient writers derive all their authority but from the poets?

Michel De Montaigne

#52. 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.

#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

#54. 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

#55. 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

#56. i am infinitely yearning
brimming
and overflowing
in words

i discover
it's another way
for me
to be in tears.

Sanober Khan

#57. 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

#58. 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

#59. 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

#60. 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

#61. When I got to Grinnell College, I was part of the black turtleneck sweater and Camel cigarette crowd of poets and writers.

Peter Coyote

#62. 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

#63. How....will I ever truly depict you?
You're perfect, my writing isn't.

Sanober Khan

#64. 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

#65. It is kind of ridiculous that a poet is expected to live in the real world.

Sanober Khan

#66. We have conversations with each other most nights - Sylvia Plath and me!

Avijeet Das

#67. We hold on to poetry because it lights a fire in our soul and keeps our bodies warm.

Sanober Khan

#68. 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

#69. The distinction between poets and prose writers is a vulgar error.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

#70. And everyone wants to read the poem
we're afraid to write.

Kelli Russell Agodon

#71. 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

#72. 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