Top 1200 Writers And Poets Quotes & Sayings - Page 18

I'm inspired by playwrights, novelists, poets: The value of language has been a lifelong passion of mine. I enjoy it. I'm good at it.

Im not, by nature, a collaborator. My biggest influences were people like painters and poets. These are solitary workers.

There are some great writers who are great talkers, but there are more great writers who are not great talkers. People seem to think there is some connection between talking and writing, but I love to talk and if there were some connection between the two of them I would be the most prolific writer in the history of the world.

Poetry is the work of poets, not of peoples or communities; artistic creation can never be anything but the production of an individual mind.

Hunter S. Thompson and I are old friends, but what we do is so different. There are surface similarities that really have to do with us being frustrated poets.

Poets, for example, are generally considered starry-eyed and sensitive, but only by those who have never encountered one.

Time is, after all, the greatest of poets; and the sons of Memory stand a better chance of being the heirs of Fame.

I think it's significantly easier to be a female writer today than in the early 1800's. That said, it's hard to imagine almost anyone who knows anything about publishing disagreeing with the statement that women writers today are often taken much less seriously than men writers. But it's hard to quantify, and even define, what being taken seriously means.

Poets think in short lines. Unless you're Samuel Beckett, Twitter might be more difficult for novelists.

My sisters were going out with artists and poets, and eventually it was the creative world which attracted me.

Unjustly poets we asperse: Truth shines the brighter clad in verse, And all the fictions they pursue Do but insinuate what is true.

If you look at most women's writing, women writers will describe women differently from the way male writers describe women. The details that go into a woman writer's description of a female character are, perhaps, a little more judgmental. They're looking for certain things, because they know what women do to look a certain way.

I say, doctors are the profiteers of death and unclaimed cadavers that were once inhabited by homeless and wondering poets!

When I was thinking about these women characters, no matter how bad a person I am - a bad writer, my limitations, my sexism, you know - the thought was, it would be useful as a writer to try to create a template for all the male writers, especially Dominican male writers, especially males of color, of how a writer can use seeing to create more nuanced representations of women.

I'm very proud of the fact that I'm one of Britain's biggest selling poets. That gives me a huge amount of pleasure.

I'm very grateful to all the people of Fresno, to Philip Levine and all the poets before me, and all the farmworkers. I didn't get here by myself.

[The poets' role is that of] capturing on their instruments the secret stir of life in the air and giving it voice in the music of prophecy

Once you reach your fifties, you have to stop being interested in the present and write only on Elizabethan poets.

The world calls them its singers and poets and artists and storytellers; but they are just people who have never forgotten the way to fairyland.

I think it's not an accident that you don't have that many Asian American women writers who are breaking out. I don't think it's an accident that you don't have that many Asian American writers, either women or men. I don't think that immigrants are encouraged to become artists. That's very gendered and racialized and ethnicized.

Mind and body are not to be taken lightly. Their connection is intimate and mysterious, and better mapped by poets than pornographers.

Popular poets are the parish priests of the Muse, retailing her ancient divinations to a long since converted public.

The majority of American writers today have chosen passive non-resistance to things as they are, producing sloughs of poetry about their personal angst and anomie, cascades of short stories and rivers of novels obsessed with the nuances of domestic relationships - suburban hanky-panky - chic boutique shopping mall literary soap opera. When they do speak out on matters of controversy they attack not the evils of our time but fellow writers who may insist on complaining.

Show people your stuff, listen carefully to their responses, but ultimately don't value anyone's opinion above your own. Be influenced by writers you dislike as well as writers you like. Read their stuff to figure out what's wrong. Find a balance between the confidence that allows you continue, and the self-critical facility that enables you to improve. Get the balance wrong on either side, and you're screwed.

The people who review my books, generally, are kind of youngish culture writers who aspire to write books. When someone writes a book review, they obviously already self-identify as a writer. I mean, they are. They're writers, they're critics, and they're writing about a book about a writer who's a critic. So I think it's really hard for people to distance themselves from what they're criticizing.

The real giants have always been poets, men who jumped from facts into the realm of imagination and ideas.

In working on a poem, I love to revise. Lots of younger poets don't enjoy this, but in the process of revision I discover things.

but as God said, crossing his legs, I see where I have made plenty of poets but not so very much poetry.

I'm not a historian. I know historians. I've worked with them. They have a really powerful way of looking at the world, and I think so do poets.

The philosophers of antiquity taught contempt for work, that degradation of the free man, the poets sang of idleness, that gift from the Gods.

Another one of the old poets, whose name has escaped my memory at present, called Truth the daughter of Time.

I never became a writer for the money. I am a poet first. Even getting published is a miracle for poets.

For me rappers and dancers are poets and artists and often times the most interesting performances are given by them.

Poets, not otherwise than philosophers, painters, sculptors, and musicians, are, in one sense, the creators, and, in another, the creations, of their age.

There have always been poets who performed. Blake sang his Songs of Innocence and Experience to parties of friends.

There is an extraordinary degree of amity among Washington poets. They hang together. You would be hard pressed to find that in Manhattan.

In working on a poem, I love to revise. Lots of younger poets don't enjoy this, but in the process of revision I discover things

Poets like Shakespeare know more about poetry than any $25 an hour man.

Meeting writers is always so disappointing. I got over wanting to meet live writers quite a long time ago. There is this terrific book that has changed your life, and then you meet the author, and he has shifty eyes and funny shoes and he won't talk about anything except the injustice of the United States income tax structure toward people with fluctuating income, or how to breed Black Angus cows, or something.

I shall state my thesis plain. The first poets were gods. Poetry began with the bicameral mind.

A lot of writers choose to live in New York, partly because of the literary culture here, and partly because Brooklyn's a pretty nice place to live. And a lot of writers who might not geographically reside in New York still point their ambitions towards New York in some sense.

Malcolm X is a person who has inspired - he has been the muse of several generations of black cultural workers, artists, poets, playwrights.

I think poets should work in the non-literary, non-academic world, get to know more than a workshop or a university.

Most poets' revisions are disastrous. They buckle and dent what was originally forged at a red-hot heat.

I see this with experienced writers, too: They worry so much about the plot that they lose sight of the characters. They lose sight of why they are telling the story. They don't let the characters actually speak. Characters will start to dictate the story in sometimes surprising, emotional, and funny ways. If the writers are not open to those surprises, they're going to strangle the life, spark, or spirit out of their work.

Translated literature can be fascinating. There's something so intriguing about reading the text second hand - a piece of prose that has already been through an extra filter, another consciousness, in the guise of the translator. Some of my favorite writers who have written in English were doing so without English being their first language, so there's a sense of distance or of distortion there, too. Conrad. Nabokov. These writers were employing English in interesting ways.

I'm afraid I take ... this rather clinical view of love: it's saving you from madness. I'm not so enthusiastic as other poets have been.

Truth like a blanket that always leaves your feet cold screenwriter of Dead Poets' Society.

I don't think anybody can teach anybody anything. I think that you learn it, but the young writer that is as I say demon-driven and wants to learn and has got to write, he don't know why, he will learn from almost any source that he finds. He will learn from older people who are not writers, he will learn from writers, but he learns it -- you can't teach it.

Literature is the one place in any society where, within the secrecy of our own heads, we can hear voices talking about everythingin every possible way. The reason for ensuring that that privileged arena is preserved is not that writers want the absolute freedom to say and do whatever they please. It is that we, all of us, readers and writers and citizens and generals and goodmen, need that little, unimportant-looking room. We do not need to call it sacred, but we do need to remember that it is necessary.

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Frequently, as so many poets and psalmists and songwriters have said, the invisible shift happens through the broken places.

When critics are waiting to pounce upon poetic style on exactly the same grounds as if it were prose, the poets tremble.

When I used to listen to the poets in other languages and the kind of appreciation they received, I wanted to be there on the dais and experience that myself.

Salinger is such a terrific writer; he did so many great things. He is one of those writers that I still reread, simply because he makes me see the possibilities and makes me feel like writing. There are certain writers who put you in the mood to write. In the way a whiff of a cigar will bring back memories of a ballgame on a Saturday afternoon, reading Salinger makes me want to get to the typewriter.

At twilight, nature is not without loveliness, though perhaps its chief use is to illustrate quotations from the poets.

'American Playhouse' is very supportive of writers. That's really why writers like to write for 'American Playhouse' for very little money. They care about making your play, your script, not some network production. We're treated like playwrights, not like fodder for some machine.

Writers of color are given certain messages - explicit or implicit - about what they're allowed to write about or what will be successful if they write about it. And white writers are given another set of implicit and, sometimes, explicit messages.

The great religions are the ships, Poets the life boats. Every sane person I know has jumped overboard.

Can you imagine writers influencing things in America? Can you imagine a writer in England influencing? Absolutely not. And in France? It used to be, but no more - absolutely not. France used to, at least, have writers as diplomats, but not any more.