Top 100 Quotes About Writing Poetry
#1. Life makes writing poetry necessary to prove I really was paying attention.
Mark Strand
#2. 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
#3. When writing poetry, it is not that produces a bright idea, but the bright idea that kindles the fire of.
Cesare Pavese
#4. She made a firm resolution, one of the resolutions she was making almost daily these days. No more sleepovers, no more writing poetry, no more wasting time. Time to tidy up your life. Time to start again.
David Nicholls
#6. How many people have stopped playing guitar, writing poetry, or painting watercolors - activities packed with flow triggers - because these are also activities that do not squarely fit into culturally acceptable responsibility categories like "career" or "children"?
Steven Kotler
#7. 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
#8. 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
#9. I began writing poetry when I was about 10. Bad poetry, but you start with bad poetry.
Jonas Mekas
#10. 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
#11. One reason why I like writing poetry - you can say so many things in it that are true in poetry but wouldn't be true in prose.
Lucy Maud Montgomery
#12. and a day spent working for money is wasted while a day spent writing poetry is wasted but more honest.
Tim Lane
#13. 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
#14. 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
#15. Suffering has as much right to be expressed as a martyr has to cry out. So it may have been false to say that writing poetry after Auschwitz is impossible.
Theodor Adorno
#16. 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
#17. 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
#18. I started writing poetry as a teenager in suburban Chicago out of emotional desperation.
Edward Hirsch
#19. 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.
#20. Dear Hands, I get it. You like writing poetry. But you can't bring a metaphor to a gunfight.
Rudy Francisco
#21. 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
#22. Solitude is very important in my work as a mode of inspiration, but isolation is not good in this respect. I am not writing poetry about isolation.
Wislawa Szymborska
#23. 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
#24. Remember, writing poetry is like making love: one will never know whether one's own pleasure is shared.
Cesare Pavese
#25. Everybody is writing, writing, writing - worst of all, writing poetry. It'd be better if the whole tribe of the scribblers - every damned one of us - were sent off somewhere with tool chests to do some honest work.
Walt Whitman
#26. 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
#27. When I'm writing poetry, 99.9% of my writing begins in English. I spent most of my life in English, although I am bilingual.
Pat Mora
#28. 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
#29. The ultimate aim of reading or writing poetry is to enrich one's life experience.
Marty Rubin
#30. Writing poetry is such an intense experience that it helps to start the process in a casual or wayward frame of mind.
Edward Hirsch
#31. To die with your boots on while writing poetry is not as glorious as riding a horse down Broadway with a stick of dynamite in your teeth,
Charles Bukowski
#32. You know, I can imagine not writing a novel and writing poetry only.
Vikram Seth
#33. 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
#34. Writing poetry is a pleasure, ... a pleasure out of hell
Kenneth Slessor
#35. 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
#36. I started out in life as a poet; I was only writing poetry all through my 20s. It wasn't until I was about 30 that I got serious about writing prose. While I was writing poems, I would often divert myself by reading detective novels; I liked them.
Paul Auster
#37. Writing poetry helps me to write my fiction; each thing helps the other.
Sandra Cisneros
#38. On Writing Poetry: Take everyday words beyond everyday talent and write them alive.
C.J. Heck
#39. Now, the process of writing poetry is very messy. Not systematic, never quite the same
Edward Hirsch
#40. Well, I had this little notion - I started writing when I was eleven, writing poetry. I was passionately addicted to it; it was my great refuge through adolescence.
Harry Mathews
#41. I have epiphanies all the time, because I'm always thinking. I'm a thinker. I'm always writing poetry, I'm always coming to conclusions.
Chrisette Michele
#42. 'We're not ... we haven't been writing poetry and sprinkling rose petals and tripping hand in hand under rainbows, Kay.'
'Just because you have Y chromosomes doesn't mean you can't tell each other how you feel, Dylan. Your penises won't fall off if you do.'
Kim Fielding
#43. I approach writing a poem in a much different state than when I am writing prose. It's almost as if I were working in a different language when I'm writing poetry. The words - what they are and what they can become - the possibilities of the words are vastly expanded for me when I'm writing a poem.
Pattiann Rogers
#44. I've always just liked writing poetry, but it's much later that I've discovered that there's this whole poetry world out there, that you almost have to be accepted into, like this little club.
Victoria Chang
#45. I think I would have been a writer, anyhow, in the sense of having written a story every now and then, or continued writing poetry. But it was the war experience and the two novels I wrote about Vietnam that really got me started as a professional writer.
Joe Haldeman
#46. Being able to say something lyrically, to say something that will do more than just be words, is really hard. It's easy to do when you're writing a chapter of a book or writing poetry, but it's really hard to do when you're confined to a melody line.
Nikki Sixx
#47. I do many kinds of work, and if you forbid me from binding books, from gardening, from writing poetry, from practicing walking meditation, from teaching children, I will be very unhappy. To me, work is pleasant. Pleasant or unpleaseant depends on our way of looking.
Nhat Hanh
#48. Poems have a different music from ordinary language, and every poem has a different kind of music of necessity, and that's, in a way, the hardest thing about writing poetry is waiting for that music, and sometimes you never know if it's going to come.
C. K. Williams
#49. I don't think there's any essential difference, at least for me, between writing poetry and writing prose.
Jorge Luis Borges
#50. I began to write poetry when I was about four years old. In other words, I've always been writing poetry.
Ernesto Cardenal
#51. One good way to start writing poetry is to read all kinds of poetry: not just in order to imitate but to fill up your head with it, to absorb it, to make poetry an essential part of how you view the world.
Valerie Worth
#52. There is something about writing poetry that brings a man close to the cliff's edge.
Charles Bukowski
#53. It's hot tonight and half the neighborhood is drunk. the other half is dead. if I have any advice about writing poetry it's - don't. I'm going to send out for some fried chicken.
Charles Bukowski
#54. Writing poetry is the only form of literary labour which gives me entire satisfaction.
Peter Porter
#55. What's the use of writing poetry for your peers? I don't think I should sell my poetry to other poets. If that's who my audience is, I'm dead, I'm not going to make any money.
Harley King
#56. In a way I spend my entire life stealing from everything - from the past, from cities I love, from where I grew up - grabbing things, taking not only from architecture but from Italy, art, writing, poetry, music.
Renzo Piano
#57. I started writing poetry because language was how I understood the world. It was a paradigm that made everything matter and in forms that were safe to hold what I felt.
Grace Cavalieri
#58. Writing poetry is talking to oneself; yet it is a mode of talking to oneself in which the self disappears; and the product's something that, though it may not be for everybody, is about everybody.
Richard Wilbur
#59. Writing poetry is what I am. I wouldn't know what else to be.
Alice Notley
#60. Before you ridicule, remember somebody on a railway platform who seems to be train spotting may actually be writing poetry.
John Hegley
#61. On July 26, 1916, I announced to all my friends in America that from now on I resolved to write no more poems in the classical language, and to begin my experiments in writing poetry in the so-called vulgar tongue of the people.
Hu Shih
#62. Gregory Corso used to get really pissed when people called Bob Dylan a 'poet.' After writing poetry for a few years, I can understand that.
Steve Earle
#63. Was not writing poetry a secret transaction, a voice answering a voice?
Virginia Woolf
#64. I wrote poetry in middle school and high school and even through college. It was bad. I just don't think I'm very good at writing poetry. I mean, the distillation, I think, is hard for me, but I love poetry.
Jesmyn Ward
#65. Writing poetry is like an opiate. When you get hooked on a blank page in the notebook, that attracts you like fireflies in the night, and you just have to translate your thoughts into words.
I'm addicted to words.
Stjepan Varesevac Cobets
#67. Learning to program has no more to do with designing interactive software than learning to touch type has to do with writing poetry
Ted Nelson
#68. The aim of art is almost divine: to bring to life again if it is writing history, to create if it is writing poetry.
Victor Hugo
#69. I guess the thing that I'm most proud of is that I kept on writing poetry. I understand that poetry is sort of the source of everything I do. It's the source of my creativity.
Erica Jong
#70. Writing poetry makes you intensely conscious of how words sound, both aloud and inside the head of the reader. You learn the weight of words and how they sound to the ear.
Helen Dunmore
#71. When the poet is in love, he is incapable of writing poetry on love. He has to write when he remembers that he was in love.
Umberto Eco
#72. I wanted to be a composer for a while, and for a while, and maybe still, I found writing music much easier than writing poetry. So maybe my brain clings to it.
Shane McCrae
#73. With fiction, I tend to get to my desk and start writing. Poetry I write in my head, often while walking, so that my poems have an organic quality, hopefully.
John Burnside
#74. Writing poetry is like always being in love. What masochism! What luxury!
Jennifer Stone
#75. The mysterious thing about writing poetry is that when you're - when things are going poorly, when you're not thinking well, even making two sentences together is extremely hard and I just can't make the connections.
Edward Hirsch
#76. There is a gap in my work from '84 to 2002, 18 years where I stopped writing. I was working at fiction and other things and starting a school and getting married and starting a family, but I wasn't writing poetry for the better part of 15 years.
Philip Schultz
#77. If you were writing poetry it was somewhat safer to be a woman than a man.
Alice Munro
#78. I know some people might think it odd - unworthy even - for me to have written a cookbook, but I make no apologies. The U.S. poet laureate Billy Collins thought I had demeaned myself by writing poetry for Hallmark Cards, but I am the people's poet so I write for the people.
Maya Angelou
#79. He started writing poetry again, but it didn't come as easily. It was hard now to get past the self-consciousness - the silliness, really - of being such a well-established adult applying himself, seriously, to such a youthful joy.
B.J. Novak
#80. I think the culture can absorb so many people writing poetry and trying to earn their living in poetry.
Edward Hirsch
#81. Frankly, writing poetry for children is plain old fun, and I consider myself blessed to have such a delightful career.
Jack Prelutsky
#82. 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
#83. To think of writing poetry as a "career" is not only ridiculous, it's dangerous. To the imagination. To the way one thinks of art. The reason poetry as a genre is so special is because it cannot be made a commodity.
Cate Marvin
#84. Nonfiction ties your hands a bit, and just like writing poetry in rhyme, it can force you to make more brutal decisions in terms of word choice, plot, etc.
Emily Susan Rapp
#85. I don't know if you actually get something out of writing poetry. I think poetry is an autonomous muse that decides to come and sit on your couch.
Alice Walker
#86. One of the ways in which I feel close to God is writing poetry.
Christian Wiman
#87. I began writing and became attached to writing at an early age. I began by writing poetry and experimenting with dialogues: modest plays, in other words. I also used to describe at great length the way people in the area lived.
Hassan Blasim
#88. Then I discovered I loved writing poetry more than fiction.
George Murray
#89. I think that the dark side of MFA programs is that they're generating more poets than the culture can absorb and there are more people writing poetry than possibly read it or can certainly earn a living around it.
Edward Hirsch
#90. He was in the frame of mind when a weaker man would have started writing poetry.
P.G. Wodehouse
#91. Writing poetry requires frequent visits to the land of the dead.
Marty Rubin
#92. I have been writing poetry since 1975. My first poetry book was published in 1986.
Taslima Nasrin
#93. Writing poetry and reading books causes brain damage.
Pat Conroy
#94. There's very little of the intentional about the business of writing poetry, as least as far as I can see.
Paul Muldoon
#96. But if a stranger in the train asks me my occupation, I never answer "writer" for fear that he may go on to ask me what I write, and to answer "poetry" would embarrass us both, for we both know that nobody can earn a living simply by writing poetry.
W. H. Auden
#97. I find great consolation in having a lot of poetry books around. I believe that writing poetry and reading it are deeply intertwined. I've always delighted in the company of the poets I've read.
Edward Hirsch
#98. Writing poetry, we live among the wild beasts, and when we touch a man, the stuff of someone in whom we believed, and he goes to pieces like a rotten pie, you ... gather together whatever can be salvaged, while I cup my hands around the live coal of life.
Pablo Neruda
#99. A great many people seem to think writing poetry is worthwhile, even though it pays next to nothing and is not as widely read as it should be.
Mark Strand
#100. Writing poetry, which for me was then saying how I felt about this and that, didn't help me to understand the world I lived in.
Grace Paley
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