Top 1200 Writers And Poets Quotes & Sayings - Page 16

There is a long-standing tradition in America of scoffing at poets, especially if they show any interest in politics.

What we're trying to do as writers is rescue, preserve this space of thoughtfulness of language, of a deeper and more honest appreciation of our reality. And, so, we have to work even harder as writers against this tide of silliness, against this tide of superficiality, against this horrible Greek chorus on Twitter where everyone is insulting each other and now we have an insulter-in-chief, who's risen to the presidency by insulting people.

I thought originally when I was in school and I wanted to be a poet, I knew that poets seemed to be miserable.

I just can't say enough about the actors having faith and trust in the writers and the writers having faith and trust in the actors.

Read a lot. But read as a writer, to see how other writers are doing it. And make your knowledge of literature in English as deep and broad as you can. In workshops, writers are often told to read what is being written now, but if that is all you read, you are limiting yourself. You need to get a good overall sense of English literary history, so you can write out of that knowledge.

Once, I was a poet, and, like all poets, I spent too long in the Kingdom of Dreams.

If we treat each other as if we are geniuses, poets and artists, we have a better chance of becoming that on stage.

Poets can't resist the dramatic pull of their lives and so inevitably write autobiographical verse.

Advice to Young Poets Never pretend to be a unicorn by sticking a plunger on your head.

Black Poets should live--not leap From steel bridges, like the white boys do.

It's hard to put into words. Gorillas are not complainers. We're dreamers, poets, philosophers, nap takers.

I envy poets because nobody ever asks them if it's true or false.

Knowledge and increase of enduring joy From the great Nature that exists in works Of mighty Poets.

I love men. I've always been drawn to poets, artists, and madmen. Sometimes all three in one

Living in a state of psychic unrest, in a Borderland, is what makes poets write and artists create.

Poets are like baseball pitchers. Both have their moments. The intervals are the tough things.

The people must grant a hearing to the best poets they have else they will never have better.

I was able to read poets that were - allowed me to be humorous without being silly.

There are three things in the world that he held in the smallest esteem - slugs, poets and caddies with hiccups.

Saints and martyrs had never interested Maggie so much as sages and poets.

It makes me happy to meet other poetry fans. Especially when they recommend poets I'm not familiar with.

All the lousy little poets coming around trying to sound like Charles Manson.

I have never felt inhibited in trying to write as well as the greatest English poets.

If any of you are secret poets, the best way to break into print is to run for the presidency.

Children can write poetry and then, unless they're poets, they stop when reach puberty.

Poets are always ahead of things in a certain way, their sense of language and their vision.

We Poets in our youth begin in gladness; But thereof come in the end despondency and madness.

The public is probably more suspicious of poets than women, and maybe for good reason.

Certainly the modern poets I cherish most are disturbing spirits; they do not come to coo.

Painters and poets are obliged to exaggerate the proportions of their figures in order to give true perspective.

It is Homer who has chiefly taught other poets the art of telling lies skillfully.

The reason some crime writers have a chip on their shoulder about the label is because their good books are shelved beside books about nuns and birdwatchers and cats who solve crimes. Overseas, my books are reviewed alongside those of authors like Robert Stone and Don DeLillo, and I have to live and die by that comparison. They don't ghettoize crime writers in other countries, and of course they shouldn't.

To carry language from two dimensions into three is the task of the poets, and the rebels in the 20th Century.

There are so many different kinds of writing and so many ways to work that the only rule is this: do what works. Almost everything has been tried and found to succeed for somebody. The methods, even the ideas of successful writers contradict each other in a most heartening way, and the only element I find common to all successful writers is persistence-an overwhelming determination to succeed.

There are writers you admire, for the skill or the art, for the inventiveness or for the professionalism of a career well spent. And there are writers-sometimes the same ones, sometimes not-to whom you are powerfully attracted, for reasons that may or may not have to do with literary values. They speak to you, or speak for you, sometimes with a voice that could almost be your own. Often there is one writer in particular who awakens you, who is the teacher they say you will meet when you are ready for the lesson.

If God made poets for anything, it was to keep alive the traditions of the pure, the holy, and the beautiful.

Many performance poets seem to believe that yelling a poem makes it comprehensible. They are wrong.

Even the greatest poets can't express tragedy in a way that is larger than their immediate circumstances.

Revolution is glorified by intellectuals, apotheosized by poets, sanctified by visionaries, and bled white by politicians.

The poets began drifting away from churches as the jurists grew louder and more insistent.

I am what libraries and librarians have made me, with little assistance from a professor of Greek and poets.

Subtract from many modern poets all that may be found in Shakespeare, and trash will remain.

Living at that pitch, on that edge, is something which many poets engage in to some extent.

All poets' wives have rotten lives Their husbands look at them like knives.

Poets, the first instructors of mankind, Brought all things to the proper native use.

Poets... are literal-minded men who will squeeze a word till it hurts.

That famous writer’s block is a myth as far as I’m concerned. I think bad writers must have a great difficulty writing. They don’t want to do it. They have become writers out of reasons of ambition. It must be a great strain to them to make marks on a page when they really have nothing much to say, and don’t enjoy doing it. I’m not so sure what I have to say but I certainly enjoy making sentences.

Many poets write as if they had been decerebrated, and not simply lobotomized, as a cure for their melancholia.

All good poets of the past, almost without exception, were at least bilingual if not trilingual.

Mediocrity in poets has never been tolerated by either men, or gods, or booksellers.

Let the poets cry themselves to sleep, and all their tearful words will turn back into steam.

Lazy poets try to elicit a reader's response with words designed to tug at the heart.

I am what libraries and librarians have made me, with little assistance from a professor of Greek and poets

Several factors besides skill are more significant in professional writers than in most amateurs. One is love of the surface level of language: the sound of it; the taste of it on the tongue; what it can be made to do in virtuosic passages that exist only for their own sake, like cadenzas in baroque concerti. Writers in love with their tools are not unlike surgeons obsessed with their scalpels, or Arctic sled racers who sleep among their dogs even when they don't have to.

Do not Christians and Heathens, and Jews and Gentiles, and poets and philosophers, unite in allowing the starry influences?

I have the feeling that a lot of poets writing now are - they sort of tap dance through it.

People will always blame the poets for society's ills. But these are the true artists.

You have to write some poetry, first of all, to decide if you can become a lyricist. I was born in a family of poets.

Somebody said that writers are like otters... Otters, if they do a trick and you give them a fish, the next time they'll do a better trick or a different trick because they'd already done that one. And writers tend to be otters. Most of us get pretty bored doing the same trick. We've done it, so let's do something different.

Grave authors say, and witty poets sing, That honest wedlock is a glorious thing.