Top 1200 Poetry Reading Quotes & Sayings - Page 3

The great thing about reading for Quentin [Tarantino] is you're not reading for him, he's reading with you. So he sits right next to you.

I would be happier if people who went through MFA programs also were already, by then, deeply committed readers of poetry because we need readers of poetry as much as writers of poetry.

Well, probably I was fed up with concrete poetry. There was a lot of bad concrete poetry and besides, it was confused with visual poetry which was completely different.

I'm a failed poet. Reading poetry helps me to see the world differently, and I try to infuse my prose with figurative language, which goes against the trend in fiction.

As poetry is the harmony of words, so music is that of notes; and as poetry is a rise above prose and oratory, so is music the exaltation of poetry.

In reading, in literature and poetry, I found an artistic freedom that I didn't see at Woolworth's. I would read everything from Shakespeare to science fiction ... sometimes a book a day.

Teenagers are always sneaking around in drawers where they shouldn't go and reading things they shouldn't be reading. And that's an attempt to try, I think, to penetrate, that's how I found out as a teenager what was going on, was by sneaking into drawers and reading letters that I had no business reading.

I began my writing life as a poet, so poetry has always been fundamental. I evolved from poetry to journalism to stories to novels. But poetry was always there.

You know how it is when you're reading a book and falling asleep, you're reading, reading... and all of a sudden you notice your eyes are closed? I'm like that all the time.

I was reading the poems of Rochester. Rochester made himself out to be bisexual, but I think that was only to shock. Most of his poetry is sexual, even pornographic.

I think reading a room - reading the personalities, reading body language - is kind of a lost art.

What poetry does above all else is develop sensibility. And that's what makes poetry so dangerous. That's why poetry is so good at undermining governments and so bad at building them. There's nothing harder to organize than a group of poets.

I did a weird thing when I was about 24. For four years I had written quite a lot of poetry, and I started reading through it and thought some of it was really good. So I burnt it all.

Poetry is supposed to be musical. But people don't understand prose. They're so used to reading journalism - clunky, functional sentences that convey factual information - facts, more than just the surfaces of things.

When you read something, and especially when you're reading compellingly great, that becomes part of your identity, at least while you're reading it. You become changed by reading it.

A banker warned the British poet Robert Graves that one could not grow rich writing poetry. He replied that if there was no money in poetry, there was certainly no poetry in money, and so it was all even.

For the last episode [of Downton Abbey], you'll need some handkerchiefs. I needed handkerchiefs reading it. It wasn't because it necessarily moved me while reading it, but it was the experience of reading it when I realized it was the last time I was ever going to be reading one of those scripts. That was quite terminal.

I was just reading some poetry, and it talked about how things start as one thing and change into another, and I just thought, what a great concept for a song.

What do teachers and curriculum directors mean by 'value' reading? A look at the practice of most schools suggests that when a school 'values' reading what it really means is that the school intensely focuses on raising state-mandated reading test scores- the kind of reading our students will rarely, if ever, do in adulthood.

My personal view is that reading has to be balanced. Obviously, there's a certain amount of reading that we have to do academically to continue to learn and to grow, but it's got to be balanced with fun and with elective reading. Whether that's comic books or Jane Austen, if it makes you excited about reading, that's what matters.

I think poetry bridges text and image. Poetry is visual in its imagery - but it requires close attention to words themselves. Words become jewels in poetry, while they are often tools in other genres.

I love reading any interesting book. If it is boring I keep it forever after reading 4-5 pages of it. But if it is good, I can go on reading it no matter what genre it belongs to.

Spoken word poetry is the art of performance poetry. I tell people it involves creating poetry that doesn't just want to sit on paper, that something about it demands it be heard out loud or witnessed in person.

Reading poetry gives me a sense of calm, well-being, and love for humanity - the same stuff more flexible women get from yoga.

One good way to start writing poetry is to read all kinds of poetry: not just in order to imitate but to fill up your head with it, to absorb it, to make poetry an essential part of how you view the world.

Poems very seldom consist of poetry and nothing else; and pleasure can be derived also from their other ingredients. I am convinced that most readers, when they think they are admiring poetry, are deceived by inability to analyse their sensations, and that they are really admiring, not the poetry of the passage before them, but something else in it, which they like better than poetry.

Poetry is the journal of the sea animal living on land, wanting to fly in the air. Poetry is a search for syllables to shoot at the barriers of the unknown and the unknowable. Poetry is a phantom script telling how rainbows are made and why they go away.

I'm reading a manuscript by Rodney Jones, "Village Prodigies",it's one of the best contemporary poetry books I've ever read ever.

If we ask a vague question, such as, 'What is poetry?' we expect a vague answer, such as, 'Poetry is the music of words,' or 'Poetry is the linguistic correction of disorder.'

I began writing poetry when I was about 10. Bad poetry, but you start with bad poetry.

Poetry is interesting because not everyone is going to become a great poet, but anyone can be, and anyone can enjoy poetry, and it's this openness, this accessibility of poetry that makes it the language of people.

What has always attracted me in life is poetry. Any genre can have poetry. For me, poetry contains truth.

I think my brain is full of collisions and that's how I like to read and process information. I'm always comparing things and I think I do that subconsciously when I'm reading books of poetry.

In school I was sidelined by Tamil language teachers. But in the film industry, I got interested in Tamil poetry after reading and working with the Vairamuthu.

Poetry is like walking along a little, tiny, narrow ridge up on a precipice. You never know the next step, whether there's going to be a plunge. I think poetry is dangerous. There's nothing mild and predictable about poetry.

My erotic poetry is not poetry that uses vernacular words. It is a very erotic poetry, but I never use anything, for example, that is not in the dictionary. I don't like to be ugly, I seek out what is beautiful, and if my great search is for freedom and beauty, I can't be vulgar, ordinary.

There's a remarkable power about reading together, reading collectively, that's brought out by reading groups.

We learn what poetry is - if we ever learn - by reading it.

Poetry can save the world. I'm a real believer in its power of healing and transforming. I wish more people read it ... Poetry is probably as close as I would get to religious feeling. I think poetry makes the world stand still.

I don't know that I had a sense that there was such a thing as "the poetry world" in the 1960s and early 70s. Maybe poets did, but for me as an onlooker and reader of poetry, poetry felt like it was part of a larger literary world. I mean, even the phrase "the poetry world" reflects a sort of balkanization of American literary and artistic life that has to some extent happened since then.

For whatever reason, people, including very well-educated people or people otherwise interested in reading, do not read poetry

Reading is dreaming. Reading is entering a world of imagination shared between reader and author. Reading is getting beyond the words to the story or meaning underneath.

For whatever reason, people, including very well-educated people or people otherwise interested in reading, do not read poetry.

I am angry that I starved my brain and that I sat shivering in my bed at night instead of dancing or reading poetry or eating ice cream or kissing a boy.

I wrote some bad poetry that I published in North African journals, but even as I withdrew into this reading, I also led the life of a kind of young hooligan.

In the 1970s, for example, I found myself learning to relish the poetry of Andrew Marvell and Sir Thomas Wyatt, and getting a handle on poetry of plainer speech than I had dwelt with heretofore. Which led me into a new appreciation of middle [William Butler ] Yeats, of the short three-beat line and forward-driving syntax, and that paid in, in turn, to a poem like Casualty in Field Work. The traffic, however, was usually the other way. My teaching was animated by what I was reading and being excited by as a poet.

Reading a piece of poetry with no beat in front of 20 people is way more challenging than rocking for 10,000 people.

If every head of state and every government official spent an hour a day reading poetry we'd live in a much more humane and decent world.

I’m a poet. And then I put the poetry in the drama. I put it in short stories, and I put it in the plays. Poetry’s poetry. It doesn’t have to be called a poem, you know.

Religious poetry, civic poetry, lyric or dramatic poetry are all categories of man's expression which are valid only if the endorsement of formal content is valid.

When I'm sitting in my hotel room, I'm reading. If I've got some time after class, I'm reading. If I can get away with it while I'm doing treatment, I'm reading.

Reading is everything. Reading makes me feel like I've accomplished something, learned something, become a better person. Reading makes me smarter. Reading gives me something to talk about later on. Reading is the unbelievably healthy way my attention deficit disorder medicates itself. Reading is escape, and the opposite of escape; it's a way to make contact with reality after a day of making things up, and it's a way of making contact with someone else's imagination after a day that's all too real. Reading is grist. Reading is bliss.

Poetry seems to sink into us the way prose doesn't. I can still quote verses I learned when I was very young, but I have trouble remembering one line of a novel I just finished reading.

Poetry's unnat'ral; no man ever talked poetry 'cept a beadle on boxin' day, or Warren's blackin' or Rowland's oil, or some o' them low fellows; never you let yourself down to talk poetry, my boy.

Listening to music and lyrics and watching movies, I think, uses a lot of the same muscles we use in reading and experiencing poetry - and yet we somehow forget that we have those when it comes to sitting down with a book of poems.

Particularly when I thought of myself as a Wallace Stevens acolyte, I wrote very difficult poetry and I was really guilty of not knowing what I was talking about. I was going for a kind of clever verbal effect. I was trying to sound linguistically or verbally interesting. I had a sense, I guess, from just reading a lot of poetry of how a poem would start and how it would end but really I didn't know what I was doing. It had very little connection to my life.

I grew up in this household where reading was the most noble thing you could do. When I was a teenager, we would have family dinners where we all sat there reading. It wasn't because we didn't like each other. We just liked reading. The person who made my reading list until my late teen years was my mom.

I think vampires have gotten maybe a little bit silly in the last years where they're all wearing crushed velvet and reading poetry and making sweet love to their victims, you know, it's not really all that scary.

When I was young, there was no such thing as YA. You simply went from reading children's novels to reading adult novels. So one year, I was reading Tove Jansson, and the next year, I was reading Stephen King.

Well meaning adults can easily destroy a child's love of reading - do not discourage children from reading because you feel they're reading the wrong thing. There is no such thing as the wrong thing to be reading and no bad fiction for kids.