A Quote by Mary Ann Hoberman

I always hesitate to call myself a children's poet, and I always hesitate to call what I write for children poetry. Though a few of the verses that I've written, yes, I think they are truly poems.

Mary Ann Hoberman

Quote Topics

Always Call Children Few Hesitate Myself Poems Poet Poetry Think Though Truly Verses Write Written Yes

Quote Author

Mary Ann Hoberman
American - Critic
Born: August 12, 1930

It's a big thing to call yourself a poet. All I can say is that I have always written poems. I don't think I'm interested in any discussion about whether I'm a good poet, a bad poet or a great poet. But I am sure, I want to write great poems. I think every poet should want that.

Clive James

I always hesitate when people call me a musician.I have had no musical training. I can't play anything. I really think of myself as a performer. It's always been writing for me. I evolved with my band in rock 'n' roll through poetry, not through music.

Patti Smith

It starts off like climbing a tree or solving a puzzle - poetry, if nothing else, is just fun to write. But deeper into each and every piece, you no longer hesitate to call it work. It's passion. A poet's sense of lyrical accomplishment is then his food and water, his means of survival.

Criss Jami

While I fully recognize I had made a mistake in the whole relationship, and I'll call it a human error, I hesitate to call myself a victim because I strongly believe one should take responsibility for their actions.

Paula Broadwell

Well, I still write poetry, but I wouldn't call myself a poet.

David Duchovny

I have such respect for the art of deejaying. I hesitate to even call myself a deejay.

Talib Kweli

I have always used a great variety of verse forms, especially in my poetry for children. I believe that poetry begins in childhood and that a poet who can remember his own childhood exactly can, and should, communicate to children.

William Jay Smith

In the event of an oxygen shortage on airplanes, mothers of young children are always reminded to put on their own oxygen mask first, to better assist the children with theirs. The same tactic is necessary on terra firma. There's no way of sustaining our children if we don't first rescue ourselves. I don't call that selfish behavior. I call it love.

Joyce Maynard

I don't think that I ever believed that poetry would be a career. I have always thought of poems as something more private than professional... I would never introduce myself as a poet. I will always have some other thing that I am.

Dana Goodyear

Once a poet always a poet, and even though I haven't written poems for a long time, I can nonetheless say that everything I've ever learned about writing lyrical fiction has been informed by three decades of writing in lines and stanzas. For me the real drama of fiction is almost always the drama of the language.

Jack Driscoll

If you have a few hundred followers and you let some of them molest children, they call you a cult leader. If you have a billion, they call you Pope.

Bill Maher

I have not the slightest pretension to call my verses poetry; I write now and then for no other purpose than to relieve depression or to improve my English.

Alfred Nobel

I never want my children to ever feel like they need to be a SEAL, or that they need to go into medicine, or be an astronaut in order to please me - because I don't think that's very fair. I just want them to live their own lives. I don't hesitate at every opportunity to remind my children of that.

Jonny Kim

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.