A Quote by Petra Haden

People are born with the knack to write poems and songs. I'm not a poet at all.

Petra Haden

Quote Topics

Born Knack People Poems Poet Songs Write

Quote Author

Petra Haden
American - Musician
Born: October 11, 1971

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

My best songs were written very quickly. Just about as much time as it takes to write it down is about as long as it takes to write it...In writing songs I've learned as much from Cezanne as I have from Woody Guthrie...It's not me, it's the songs. I'm just the postman, I deliver the songs...I consider myself a poet first and a musician second. I live like a poet and I'll die like a poet.

Bob Dylan

The reason a poet is a poet is to write poems, not to advertise himself as a poet.

Yehuda Amichai

I want to write songs with complete sentences. I almos have this obsession with short-changing words. I would never be so pretentious to say that my lyrics are poetry. ... Poems are poems. Song lyrics are for songs.

Ben Gibbard

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.

Ralph Fletcher

My sense of the poet is classical - the poet is one who makes poems. In each book, I develop and repeat certain general themes - time, place, memory, God, history, class, race, beauty, love, poetry, identity. The core identity is the poet making the poems.

Lawrence Joseph

I'm going to spend my life writing poems, turning them into music that will affect people and touch their hearts. I'm going to write the songs that people can't write for themselves.

Stevie Nicks

Before I was ever a poet, my father was writing poems about me, so it was a turning of the tables when I became a poet and started answering, speaking back to his poems in ways that I had not before.

Natasha Trethewey

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.

Maxine Kumin

I write songs on a universal basis. I was born out of the earth of Jamaica which I consider to be a part of Atlantis, the sunk continent, but that's my thing. But I write songs on a universal basis, not like Jamaican songs.

Jimmy Cliff

The first task of the poet is to create the person who will write the poems.

Stanley Kunitz

The poet can only write the poems; it takes the reader to complete the meaning.

Nikki Giovanni

I like to write pop songs and the stuff I write is fairly poppy, so I thought maybe my lot in life was to write pop songs for people. It never felt right writing songs for other people to sing, though.

Aaron Bruno

The chances are that, in the course of his lifetime, the major poet will write more bad poems than the minor, simply because major poets write a lot.

W. H. Auden

I just love to play rock and roll. I love to write songs all the time about what's up on these streets. I write songs about people getting killed; I write songs about people getting beaten up; I write songsabout people getting taken to jail by the police; and I also write songs about love and happiness.