A Quote by Simon Armitage

In all the poems I've written I've not really engaged in politics, and when I've found myself moving in that direction I've always stopped myself.

Simon Armitage

Quote Topics

Always Direction Engaged Found Moving Moving In Myself Poems Politics Really Stopped Written

Quote Author

Simon Armitage
British - Novelist
Born: May 26, 1963

I had taken some of my solo music into the record label. They didn't really care for the direction I was moving in and I found it really disheartening. They wanted a pop hit, which I understand in terms of making money. I get that. But what they were going to ask of me was something I wasn't prepared to deliver and I felt kind of trapped. I just stopped writing. I just stopped. It was stifling.

Shirley Manson

I can't define myself as a political writer - I don't think I've earned it, and I don't function as a political writer in the way that many of the writers I admire do. It's not simply a question of context, of where I'm writing from - there is much in American society that urgently needs to be written about. I think your work is always engaged with politics in the looser sense of the word - and that looseness is itself a kind of privilege - because politics and culture are evidently intertwined.

Katie Kitamura

Clouds are poems, and the most moving poems linger on the blackboard so long, written in cursive so lovely, they also exist inside our fingertips. We never really erase them at the end of the lesson.

Ann Beattie

I know that one of the things that I really did to push myself was to write more formal poems, so I could feel like I was more of a master of language than I had been before. That was challenging and gratifying in so many ways. Then with these new poems, I've gone back to free verse, because it would be easy to paint myself into a corner with form. I saw myself becoming more opaque with the formal poems than I wanted to be. It took me a long time to work back into free verse again. That was a challenge in itself. You're always having to push yourself.

Barbara Hamby

I really feel like I found myself, and when I found myself, I found the music along with it.

Lauren Alaina

...by and by a change came: I started to muse about the shape of my nose. I put my trivial surroundings aside and mused more and more about myself, and I found this to be a bewitching occupation. I stopped asking and longed instead to speak of my thoughts and feelings. Alas, there was no one besides myself who found me interesting.

Tove Jansson

It was really a focus on how to in some ways keep moving in this direction towards something that allowed me to express myself in a way that sports didn't.

Mahershala Ali

When you do improv, you're everything. You're a performer, writer, and director, because you're moving the scene in the direction you want it to go, you're making it up as you go, and you're acting it. You're all of those things, so I always viewed myself that way. And with the films I've done, I've written on them, I've acted in some of them. And even ones I haven't acted in, I've acted them out just to be sure another actor can do them.

Rob Reiner

As a layperson, I consider myself fairly well-educated in terms of politics. My family always has been really interested in politics, and various members of my family have a hand in politics in upstate New York.

Reid Scott

St. Lucia represents, for me, where I found myself musically once I stopped trying to be cool, in some way, and stopped stopping these guilty pleasure influences I had from coming through.

St. Lucia

I hadn't said goodbye. It had been easier, like always, to just disappear, sparing myself the messy details of another farewell. Now, my fingers hovered over my track pad, moving the cursor down to his comment section before I stopped myself. What was the point? Anything I said now would only be an afterthought. Elizabeth who goes by her middle name

Sarah Dessen

If I can keep losing myself - and finding parts of myself - in other people's writing and direction, then that's all I can really ask for. That's all I want, to keep losing myself.

Andrew Garfield

I treat myself as one of the sources. And, again, I think that’s accurate. One of the poets I read most frequently is myself. I really do. I read my own poems obsessively.

Dan Chiasson

What do you have in mind after you graduate?" What I always thought I had in mind was getting some big scholarship to graduate school or a grant to study all over Europe, and then I thought I'd be a professor and write books of poems or write books of poems and be an editor of some sort. Usually I had these plans on the tip of my tongue. "I don't really know," I heard myself say. I felt a deep shock, hearing myself say that, because the minute I said it, I knew it was true.

Sylvia Plath

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.