Top 1200 Writers And Poets Quotes & Sayings - Page 14

Of course poets have morals and manners of their own, and custom is no argument with them.

There are many people who say, I write for myself. I think that if you write and publish, then you write for your readers, not just for yourself. Many writers say that they write to be loved. I place myself among those writers.

Writing has power, but its power has no vector. Writers can stir the mind, but they can't direct it. Time changes things, God changes things, the dictators change things, but writers can't change anything.

I've always loved short stories. Even before I was a writer I was reading short stories - there were certain writers where I just felt like they could do in a short story what so many writers needed a whole novel to do, and that was really inspiring to me. Alice Munro, I felt that way about from an early time. Grace Paley.

Children's book writers tend to feel quite superior, and adult writers tend to feel they wouldn't know how to write a children's book - which might surprise you because I think a lot of people think it's the other way around.

I did sketch comedy with a troupe at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe.

It was always about the future of writers, and about the way writers are treated in the future, and I think that was really hurtful to a lot of people in my position who had 160 people who depended on them to get this over with. So there was a lot of pain in it, and in that sense it will never be worth it, but I do think it was important.

Reviewing books is all about coziness. It is all of it a kind of caucus race. Women review women, Jewish writers review and praise Jewish writers, blacks review blacks, etc.

I cant look at things in the simple, large way that great poets do.

Poetry itself hasn't been well served by poets who fled to the margins.

The scholars and poets of an earlier time can be read only with a dictionary to help.

Poets write the words you have heard before but in a new sequence.

The BFI exists to celebrate all poets of world cinema, of the past and present.

Life would die without poets, and democracy must have its spellbinders.

Poets that lasting marble seek Must come in Latin or in Greek.

Why is contemporary China short of works that speak directly? Because we writers cannot speak directly, or rather we can only speak in an indirect way.Why does contemporary China lack good works that critique our current situation? Because our current situation may not be critiqued. We have not only lost the right to criticise, but the courage to do so.Why is modern China lacking in great writers? Because all the great writers are castrated while still in the nursery.

Tis a question whether adversity or prosperity makes the most poets.

The bitterest satires and noblest eulogies on married life have come from poets.

I think I've always felt very isolated, and I'm sure lots of poets do.

Writers don't want to appear to be stupid. I don't know - maybe people become writers so that they can prove that they're not. Of course getting a book published doesn't mean that they're not stupid. At a certain point you have to stop trying to prove something and write because you need to think about something and want to communicate, in a very broad sense.

Homer has taught all other poets the art of telling lies skillfully.

Women have burnt like beacons in all the works of all the poets from the beginning of time.

Abyss-mongering makes professors and poets feel daring.

Our poets are men of talents who sing, and not the children of music.

The poets have familiarized more people with history than have the historians.

Children have a master to teach them, grown-ups have the poets.

All the poet can do today is warn. That is why true Poets must be truthful.

I think the one reason that writers marry other writers - one of the reasons that I married another writer - was, I fell in love with that writer. But second of all, I had been married before and a source of marital strife was me needing to go away for a couple of weeks to write or it's Saturday and I think I just need to work today and not hang out with you.

It is a mass language only in the same sense that its baseball slang is born of baseball players. That is, it is a language which is being molded by writers to do delicate things and yet be within the grasp of superficially educated people. It is not a natural growth, much as its proletarian writers would like to think so. But compared with it at its best, English has reached the Alexandrian stage of formalism and decay.

I get a huge energy transfusion from listening to poets read their works.

Other people, some other writers, will win certain accolades or sell in far greater numbers than me - and I'm a legitimate best-selling author - but I live and die for the work. That's thrilling to me. It's thrilling that I do for others what certain writers did for me when I was a kid.

I believe that writers run out of material, I really do. I believe very strongly in the fact that when the natural time is up, writers actually do run out of material. To me it's black and white. When there's a song there's a song, when there's not there's not.

Men like to think well of themselves, and poets help them do it.

Writers only think they are interested in politics, they are not really, it gives them a chance to talk and writers like to talk but really no real writer is really interested in politics.

There are many people who say, 'I write for myself.' I think that if you write and publish, then you write for your readers, not just for yourself. Many writers say that they write to be loved. I place myself among those writers.

Poets, when they write of love, give themselves and everyone else away!

We are pantheists as natural scientists, polytheists as poets, and monotheists as moral beings.

God makes many poets, but he only gives utterance to a few.

I also want to sing the lyrics penned by poets like Srijato.

Our goal is to publish African poets in as many ways as possible.

We talk so abstractly about poetry because all of us are usually bad poets.

Ocean waters..oceans deep..Serious poets never sleep.

Poets go through a very tough apprenticeship in the use of words.

The old poets little knew what comfort they could be to a man.

Poets never die, I thought. They just fail in the end.

Poets and heroes are of the same race, the latter do what the former conceive.

When I was in the writers' room, all these writers were like, "Ugh, another star that they gave a writing-producing credit to." But then within like an hour, they were like, "You're really a writer." "Yeah, I really am. I'm a writer, and a director, and a producer, and an actor, and a painter, and I do all that stuff in the Lush Life." It was great.

I believe in dreams. People should have faith in the songs poets sing.

Poets utter great and wise things which they do not themselves understand.

Howard University holds something called "Heart's Day," an all day ceremony in which a writer is honored. I was the recipient of this honor. It's a wonderful ceremony that Eleanor Traylor chair of English at Howard University organizes for writers. Writers from around the country came to pay tribute to my work. It was very flattering.

One of my very favourite poets was a Massachusetts poet named Robert Lowell.

Poets that lasting marble seek, Must come in Latin or in Greek.

The writers I care about most and never grow tired of are: Shakespeare, Swift, Fielding, Dickens, Charles Reade, Flaubert and, among modern writers, James Joyce, T. S. Eliot and D. H. Lawrence. But I believe the modern writer who has influenced me most is Somerset Maugham, whom I admire immensely for his power of telling a story straightforwardly and without frills.

I think maybe writers come from different planets. I mean, not in any sense as extravagant as Baryshnikov. But there are some writers who understand each other this way and others who understand each other that way. Then there's this great herd, the "herd of independent minds."

Not everyone who drinks is a poet. Some of us drink because we're not poets.

The most important thing for poets to do is to write as little as possible.

You have to have more people who don't look like you in the writers room. I try to have some people who don't look like me in my writers room. I think it's important to have a group of voices, of people who can dissent.

Nations are born in the hearts of poets, they prosper and die in the hands of politicians.

My favorite thing to do is rip the covers off a script when reading for writers to hire and make everybody read without names on the covers of the script. I can't tell you how many times my writers, women and men, will pick people of color and women much more often than they would with a cover on the script.

I remember mother saying : Inventors are like poets, a trashy lot