I think of poets as outlaw visionaries in a way. — Jim Jarmusch
Writers may be disreputable, incorrigible, early to decay or late to bloom but they dare to go it alone. — John Updike
Those who write are writers. Those who wait are waiters. — A. Lee Martinez
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
Without poets, without artists, men would soon weary of nature's monotony. — Guillaume Apollinaire
Literature boils with the madcap careers of writers brought to the edge by the demands of living on their nerves, wringing out their memories and their nightmares to extract meaning, truth, beauty. — Herbert Gold
A lot of poets too live on the margins of social acceptance, they certainly aren't in it for the money. William Blake - only his first book was legitimately published. — Jim Jarmusch
Words are the only bullets in truth's bandolier. And poets are the snipers. — Dan Simmons
Poetry is thoughts that breathe, and words that burn. — Thomas Gray
I envy the poet. He is encouraged toward drunkenness and wallows with nubile wenches while the painter must endure wretchedness and pain for his art. — Rembrandt
The truest writers are those who see language not as a linguistic process but as a living element. — Derek Walcott
Poets are like steam valves, where the ordinary feelings of ordinary people can escape and be shown. — Sharon Olds
Short Poets Quotes
A life without love is like a tree without fruit. — Stephen King
Nobody has ever measured, not even poets, how much the heart can hold. — Zelda Fitzgerald
Saints have no moderation, nor do poets, just exuberance. — Anne Sexton
Your eyelashes will write on my heart the poem that could never come from the pen of a poet. — Rumi
I would love to be the poet laureate of Coney Island. — Thornton Wilder
Keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you. — Rudyard Kipling
Your True Nature Is Love. There's Nothing You Can Do About It. — Byron Katie
They have the guns, we have the poets. Therefore, we will win. — Howard Zinn
Any great warrior is also a scholar, and a poet, and an artist. — Steven Seagal
While pensive poets painful vigils keep, Sleepless themselves, to give their readers sleep. — Alexander Pope
Black is not sad. Bright colours are what depress me. They're so... empty. Black is poetic. How do you imagine a poet? In a bright yellow jacket? Probably not. — Ann Demeulemeester
My role in society, or any artist's or poet's role, is to try and express what we all feel. Not to tell people how to feel. Not as a preacher, not as a leader, but as a reflection of us all. — John Lennon
A poet's job is to find a name for everything: to be a fearless finder of the names of things.
As things are, and as fundamentally they must always be, poetry is not a career, but a mug's game. No honest poet can ever feel quite sure of the permanent value of what he has written: He may have wasted his time and messed up his life for nothing. — T. S. Eliot
Poets talk about "spots of time", but it is really the fishermen who experience eternity compressed into a moment. No one can tell what a spot of time is until suddenly the whole world is a fish and the fish is gone. — Norman Maclean
Pure poetry in motion. A swift-moving, heartfelt tale of love and loss, two stories intersecting-an d connecting-by magic. Michelle Baker is a born poet, and a born writer. The Canoe is just the start of what I hope to be a long idyllic journey through the love and soul of the human heart. — Trent Zelazny
But here's the thing: what you do as a screenwriter is you sell your copyright. As a novelist, as a poet, as a playwright, you maintain your copyright. — Beth Henley
Living in a state of psychic unrest, in a Borderland, is what makes poets write and artists create. — Gloria E. Anzaldúa
Everyone is born a poet - a person discovering the way words sound and work, caring and delighting in words. I just kept on doing what everyone starts out doing. The real question is: Why did other people stop? — William Stafford
There are certain things in which mediocrity is intolerable: poetry, music, painting, public eloquence. What torture it is to hear a frigid speech being pompously declaimed, or second-rate verse spoken with all a bad poet's bombast! — Jean De La Bruyere
Those who perceive in themselves... the artistic vocation as poet, writer, sculptor, painter, musician, and actor feel at the same time an obligation not to waste this talent but to develop it, in order to put it to service of their neighbour and the humanity as a whole. — Pope John Paul II
Do you want to be an artist and a writer, or a wife and a lover? With kids, your focus changes. I don't want to go to PTA meetings. — Stevie Nicks
Don't try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say. — Barbara Kingsolver
Graffiti is like building a career. And there is a dialogue with the other artists out there mostly fellow writers because a lot of people who don't paint just see a blur when they look at it. — KAWS
The nation that complacently and fearfully allows its artists and writers to become suspected rather than respected is no longer regarded as a nation possessed with humor or depth. — James Thurber
Creativity sometimes needs the protection of darkness, of being ignored. That is very obvious in the natural tendency many artists and writers have not to show their paintings or writings before they are finished. — Marie-Louise von Franz
The work never matches the dream of perfection the artist has to start with. — William Faulkner
The simple act of an ordinary courageous man is not to take part, not to support lies! Let that come into the world and even reign over it, but not through me. Writers and artists can do more: they can vanquish lies! ... Lies can stand up against much in the world, but not against art. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Creative arts, new inventions, and new ideas spring from those blessed with imagination, and magic stimulates imagination. It is no coincidence that many artists, writers, and dancers are interested in magic. — Vivianne Crowley
Writers And Writing Quotes
The writer's job is to get the main character up a tree, and then once they are up there, throw rocks at them. — Vladimir Nabokov
A short story must have a single mood and every sentence must build towards it. — Edgar Allan Poe
I can’t write five words but that I change seven. — Dorothy Parker
If you're going to be a writer, the first essential is just to write. Do not wait for an idea. Start writing something and the ideas will come. You have to turn the faucet on before the water starts to flow. — Louis L'Amour
The number one thing I am earnestly attracted to is intelligence. Writers are thus the pinnacle of intelligence. While actors are great and awesome, writers literally create new worlds from scratch. What is sexier than that? Personally, I don't know why every person out there isn't dating a writer. — Rachel Bloom
writers are desperate people and when they stop being desperate they stop being writers. — Charles Bukowski
Writing is the flip side of sex - it's good only when it's over. — Hunter S. Thompson
Thank your readers and the critics who praise you, and then ignore them. Write for the most intelligent, wittiest, wisest audience in the universe: Write to please yourself. — Harlan Ellison
As a writer, it's disheartening to write books that you pour your soul into and not have them distributed widely enough to find their audience. — Sylvia Day
The first chapter sells the book; the last chapter sells the next book. — Mickey Spillane
Poetry By Poets Quotes
A poem is never finished, only abandoned. — Paul Valery
I've had it with these cheap sons of bitches who claim they love poetry but never buy a book. — Kenneth Rexroth
We don’t read and write poetry because it’s cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. — Robin Williams
A poet is a nightingale, who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds; his auditors are as men entranced by the melody of an unseen musician, who feel that they are moved and softened, yet know not whence or why. — Percy Bysshe Shelley
Poets are masters of us ordinary men, in knowledge of the mind, because they drink at streams which we have not yet made accessible to science. — Sigmund Freud
The inmost spirit of poetry, in other words, is at bottom, in every recorded case, the voice of pain – and the physical body, so to speak, of poetry, is the treatment by which the poet tries to reconcile that pain with the world. — Ted Hughes
Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion. — T. S. Eliot
The poet speaks adequately only when he speaks somewhat wildly... not with intellect alone, but with intellect inebriated by nectar. — Henry Miller
The way in which modern German poetry follows theories reminds me of pupils who, scolded by their teacher for their insubordination, justify themselves by saying that they invented new rules of propriety according to which they are quite well- behaved. — Franz Grillparzer
the rest of my days I spend
wandering: wondering
what, anyway,
was that sticky infusion, that rank flavor of blood, that
poetry, by which I lived? — Galway Kinnell
Great Writers Quotes
I have suffered a great deal from writers who have quoted this or that sentence of mine either out of its context or in juxtaposition to some incongruous matter which quite distorted my meaning, or destroyed it altogether. — Alfred North Whitehead
The great writers of aphorisms read as if they had all known each other well. — Elias Canetti
Peter Lucas and I live in Durham but spend a great of time in North Wales, where we have a cottage in the mountains, and in Vermont, USA, with my sister - who is a children's writer married to a poet. — Anne Stevenson
The great advantage of being a writer is that you can spy on people. You're there, listening to every word, but part of you is observing. Everything is useful to a writer, you see - every scrap, even the longest and most boring of luncheon parties. — Graham Greene
I am hoping that I can be known as a great writer and actor some day, rather than a sex symbol. — Steven Seagal
Like Richard Price and the late, great Elmore Leonard, Matt Burgess is one of those cool, quick and funny writers who can turn a seemingly routine crime caper into something special. — Carl Hiaasen
Close the door. Write with no one looking over your shoulder. Don't try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say. It's the one and only thing you have to offer. — Barbara Kingsolver
I have never thought of myself as a good writer. Anyone who wants reassurance of that should read one of my first drafts. But I'm one of the world's great rewriters. — James A. Michener
Follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly. — Franz Kafka
Writing Poetry Quotes
Real poetry, is to lead a beautiful life. To live poetry is better than to write it. — Matsuo Basho
At the age when Bengali youth almost inevitably writes poetry, I was listening to European classical music. — Satyajit Ray
When you write a song, most of the words you use are in black and white, and then, from time to time, you use one that’s in color. These words in color are a part of ourselves, because we give them a meaning. If you like, we give them a third dimension. — Jacques Brel
Write, form a rhizome, increase your territory by deterritorialization, extend the line of flight to the point where it becomes an abstract machine covering the entire plane of consistency. — Gilles Deleuze
Poetry is a packsack of invisible keepsakes. — Carl Sandburg
It was commonplace for colleagues to write comic poetry to each other, predicting the manner in which they might die. — Oliver Burkeman
The best craftsmanship always leaves holes and gaps... so that something that is not in the poem can creep, crawl, flash or thunder in. — Dylan Thomas
I was a late bloomer. But anyone who blooms at all, ever, is very lucky. — Sharon Olds
Sometimes I wish I was poetic and subtle. I write very bold and blunt and tell it like it is. — Pink
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
Writing Poems Quotes
I’d cut my soul into a million different pieces just to form a constellation to light your way home. I’d write love poems to the parts of yourself you can’t stand. I’d stand in the shadows of your heart and tell you I’m not afraid of your dark. — Andrea Gibson
It's possible, in a poem or short story, to write about commonplace things and objects using commonplace but precise language, and to endow those things—a chair, a window curtain, a fork, a stone, a woman's earring—with immense, even startling power. — Raymond Carver
You must understand the whole of life, not just one little part of it. That is why you must read, that is why you must look at the skies, that is why you must sing and dance, and write poems, and suffer, and understand, for all that is life. — Jiddu Krishnamurti
Only truthful hands write true poems. I cannot see any basic difference between a handshake and a poem. — Paul Celan
I prefer the absurdity of writing poems to the absurdity of not writing poems. — Wislawa Szymborska
Poetic justice, poetic justice.. if I told you that a flower bloom in a dark room would you trust it. I mean I write poems in these songs. — Kendrick Lamar
I have never started a poem yet whose end I knew. Writing a poem is discovering. — Robert Frost
The writing of a poem is like a child throwing stones into a mineshaft. You compose first, then you listen for the reverberation. — James Fenton
As you continue writing and rewriting, you begin to see possibilities you hadn't seen before. Writing a poem is always a process of discovery. — Robert Hayden
When composing a verse let there not be a hair's breath separating your mind from what you write; composition of a poem must be done in an instant, like a woodcutter felling a huge tree or a swordsman leaping at a dangerous enemy. — Matsuo Basho
Writing By Writers Quotes
Journalist: a person without any ideas but with an ability to express them; a writer whose skill is improved by a deadline: the more time he has, the worse he writes. — Karl Kraus
Like most-maybe all- writers, I learned to write by writing and, by example, by reading books. — Francine Prose
You write to communicate to the hearts and minds of others what's burning inside you. — Sayings
The reason 99% of all stories written are not bought by editors is very simple. Editors never buy manuscripts that are left on the closet shelf at home. — John Y. Campbell
I notice that you use plain, simple language, short words and brief sentences. That is the way to write English - it is the modern way and the best way. Stick to it; don't let fluff and flowers and verbosity creep in. — Mark Twain
Writing is the hardest way of earning a living, with the possible exception of wrestling alligators. — Richard Miller
The original writer is not he who refrains from imitating others, but he who can be imitated by none. — François-René de Chateaubriand
A blank piece of paper is God's way of telling us how hard it is to be God. — Sidney Sheldon
I know there are writers who get up every morning and sit by their typewriter or word processor or pad of paper and wait to write. I don't function that way. I go through a long period of gestation before I'm even ready to write. — Wole Soyinka
Have something to say, and say it as clearly as you can. That is the only secret. — Matthew Arnold
Every heart sings a song, incomplete, until another heart whispers back. Those who wish to sing always find a song. At the touch of a lover, everyone becomes a poet. — Plato
The female doesn't want a rich man or a handsome man or even a poet, she wants a man who understands her eyes if she gets sad, and points to his chest and say : 'Here is your home country.' — Nizar Qabbani
I think it's the responsibility of every human being, not just those who wear the identity of poet, activist, voter, religious person... it's the responsibility of every person. Our responsibility is to use our intelligence as clearly and coherently as we possibly can. — John Trudell
The great religions are the ships, Poets the life boats. Every sane person I know has jumped overboard. — Hafez
I cannot write in verse, for I am no poet. I cannot arrange the parts of speech with such art as to produce effects of light and shade, for I am no painter. Even by signs and gestures I cannot express my thoughts and feelings, for I am no dancer. But I can do so by means of sounds, for I am a musician. — Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Great wine requires a mad man to grow the vine, a wise man to watch over it, a lucid poet to make it, and a lover to drink it. — Salvador Dali
I will have my voice: Indian, Spanish, white. I will have my serpent's tongue - my woman's voice, my sexual voice, my poet's voice. I will overcome the tradition of silence. — Sayings
This is not a time to keep the facts from the people-to keep them complacent. To sound the alarm is not to panic but to seek action from an aroused public. For, as the poet Dante once said: 'The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who, in a time of great moral crisis, maintain their neutrality. — John F. Kennedy
I am a black man dedicated to expression; expression of the joy and pride of blackness. I consider myself neither poet, composer, or musician. These are merely tools used by sensitive men to carve out a piece of beauty or truth that they hope may lead to peace and salvation. — Gil Scott-Heron
In Náhuatl, the language of the Aztec world, one key word for poet was 'tlamatine,' meaning 'the one who knows,' or 'he who knows something.' Poets were considered 'sages of the word,' who meditated on human enigmas and explored the beyond, the realm of the gods. — Edward Hirsch
The artist, and particularly the poet, is always an anarchist in the best sense of the word. He must heed only the call that arises within him from three strong voices: the voice of death, with all its foreboding, the voice of love and the voice of art. — Federico Garcia Lorca
Of all the arts, abstract painting is the most difficult. It demands that you know how to draw well, that you have a heightened sensitivity for composition and for colors, and that you be a true poet. This last is essential. — Wassily Kandinsky
I would rather win souls than be the greatest king or emperor on earth; I would rather win souls than be the greatest general that ever commanded an army; I would rather win souls than be the greatest poet, or novelist, or literary man who ever walked the earth. My one ambition in life is to win as many as possible. — R. A. Torrey
Istanbul, a universal beauty where poet and archeologist, diplomat and merchant, princess and sailor, northerner and westerner screams with same admiration. The whole world thinks that this city is the most beautiful place on earth. — Edmondo De Amicis
...he who has seen the intimate beauty of nature cannot tear himself away from it again. He must become either a poet or a naturalist and, if his eyes are keen and his powers of observation sharp enough, he may well become both. — Konrad Lorenz
Almost all the noblest things that have been achieved in the world, have been achieved by poor men; poor scholars, poor professional men, poor artisans and artists, poor philosophers, poets, and men of genius. — Albert Pike
The Western poet and writer of romance has exactly the same kind of difficulty in comprehending Eastern subjects as you have in comprehending Western subjects. — Lafcadio Hearn
If we treat each other as if we are geniuses, poets and artists, we have a better chance of becoming that on stage. — Del Close
Avoid using the word 'very' because it's lazy. A man is not very tired, he is exhausted. Don't use very sad, use morose. Language was invented for one reason boys - to woo women - and in that endeavor, laziness will not do. — Robin Williams
Souls of poets dead and gone,
What Elysium have ye known,
Happy field or mossy cavern,
Choicer than the Mermaid Tavern?
Have ye tippled drink more fine
Than mine host's Canary wine? — John Keats
For every poet it is always morning in the world; history a forgotten, insomniac night. The fate of poetry is to fall in love with the world in spite of history. — Derek Walcott
The musician of disordered sound, the poet of decomposed language, the painter and sculptor of the fragmented visual and tactile world: they all portray the break up of the self and, through the rearrangement and reassemble of the fragments, try to create new structures that possess wholeness, perfection, new meaning. — Heinz Kohut
Boys, you must strive to find your own voice, because the longer you wait to begin the less likely you are to find it at all. — Robin Williams
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
One of the ridiculous aspects of being a poet is the huge gulf between how seriously we take ourselves and how generally we are ignored by everybody else. — Billy Collins
Good science and good art are always about a condition of awe. I don't think there is any other function for the poet or the scientist in the human tribe but the astonishment of the soul. — Derek Walcott
Every poet knows the pun is Pierian, that it springs from the same soil as the Muse?a matching and shifting of vowels and consonants, an adroit assonance sometimes derided as jackassonance. — Louis Untermeyer
To avoid being mistaken for a sellout, I chose my friends carefully. The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist professors and structural feminists and punk-rock performance poets. — Barack Obama
In the entire first Christian century Jesus is not mentioned by a single Greek or Roman historian, religion scholar, politician, philosopher or poet. His name never occurs in a single inscription, and it is never found in a single piece of private correspondence. Zero! Zip references! — Bart D. Ehrman
In Conclusion
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