A Quote by Jack Prelutsky

I write the poems first, with only a few exceptions for odd reasons, where I'm given the illustration first. — © Jack Prelutsky
I write the poems first, with only a few exceptions for odd reasons, where I'm given the illustration first.
Our Founding Fathers were the first to articulate the reasons for their First Amendment, the same reasons given by Learned Hand, and by Justice Brennan in New York Times v. Sullivan . It is a lesson we keep forgetting and must relearn in each succeeding generation.
The best advice on writing was given to me by my first editor, Michael Korda, of Simon and Schuster, while writing my first book. 'Finish your first draft and then we'll talk,' he said. It took me a long time to realize how good the advice was. Even if you write it wrong, write and finish your first draft. Only then, when you have a flawed whole, do you know what you have to fix.
When Emily Dickinson's poems were published in the 1890s, they were a best-seller; the first book of her poems went through eleven editions of a print run of about 400. So the first print run out of Boston for a first book of poems was 400 for a country that had fifty million people in it. Now a first print run for a first book is maybe 2,000? So that's a five-time increase in the expectation of readership. Probably the audience is almost exactly the same size as it was in 1900, if you just took that one example.
Productivity is a relative matter. And it's really insignificant: What is ultimately important is a writer's strongest books. It may be the case that we all must write many books in order to achieve a few lasting ones - just as a young writer or poet might have to write hundreds of poems before writing his first significant one.
If you want to write poetry, you must have poems that deeply move you. Poems you can't live without. I think of a poem as the blood in a blood transfusion, given from the heart of the poet to the heart of the reader. Seek after poems that live inside you, poems that move through your veins.
The first task of the poet is to create the person who will write the poems.
When I first started to write, I was aware of being queer, but I didn't write about it. Queer poems would probably not have been accepted by the editors I sent them to.
It must first be reiterated that with extraordinary few exceptions no educated person in the history of Western Civilization from the third century B.C. onward believed that the earth was flat
When I first started auditioning, I was so, dare I say, desperate and hungry for a job that I pretty much went out for anything my agents sent me with a few exceptions.
I've reached a point in life where it would be easy to let down my guard and write simple imagistic poems. But I don't want to write poems that aren't necessary. I want to write poems that matter, that have an interesting point of view.
The first rule of Zombieland: Cardio. When the zombie outbreak first hit, the first to go, for obvious reasons ... were the fatties.
I always write on unlined typing paper and write the first draft in longhand, using cheap Bic pens. I try to write about four pages a day, which usually yields a first draft in six months. I don't plot ahead of time, so I'm flying by the seat of my pants for the first draft.
I've been trying to write for as long as I can remember. But those first fifteen years didn't produce much of great interest. I mean, it embarrasses me very much to look back on my early poems--very few lines of any merit at all and lots of affectation. But there were quite a lot of them. That's a point in one's favor.
I had hoped to be a poet, and for a long time I tried to write poetry. My first published pieces were poems.
I had written here and there about my mother in my poems. There are poems for her in my first and second books.
There are many poets that use as my models. In my first book of poems, I had several for the "Sleepwalkers," I had several poems that were apprentice poems like this in which I take a walk with a poet who is no longer alive.
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