Top 1200 Writers And Poets Quotes & Sayings - Page 2

I had a country upbringing in a predominantly Maori community, and that contrasted with a very multi-cultured arts community in the Aro Valley in Wellington: growing up around a lot of theatre and poets and writers and stuff.

I actually very rarely see comedy myself, and although I admire the work of some comics, it does come from all over, so I’ll get a charge out of some fiction writers and poets.

I do have the feeling that other writers can't help you with writing. I've gone to writers' conferences and writers' sessions and writers' clinics, and the more I see of them, the more I'm sure it's the wrong direction. It isn't the place where you learn to write.

Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.

I actually very rarely see comedy myself, and although I admire the work of some comics, it does come from all over, so I'll get a charge out of some fiction writers and poets.

There's not a big range in the political poetry of the last year, or not a political range. On the one hand, no poet that I know of who writes in English in the United States is anything but a humanist. So all poets, including myself, seem to be under that umbrella. We just don't have Rush Limbaugh poets, Ann Coulter poets.

Good poets borrow, great poets steal

The great leaders of business, industry and finance, and the great artists, poets, musicians and writers all became great because they developed the power of self-motivation .

I think the special thing about Python is that it's a writers' commune. The writers are in charge. The writers decide what the material is.

A perfect poem is impossible. Once it had been written, the world would end. Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.

The poets who have written the best poems about war seem to be the poets whose countries have experienced an invasion or vicious dictatorships.

In the Western tradition, the first writers were teachers and historians, vastly traveled, who spiced their reports with fantasies. They were also poets who sang and entertained prince and pauper.

I was inspired by, when I was in college, seeing some incredible speakers come to my school: Michael Eric Dyson, Spike Lee, Nikki Giovanni, and other poets and writers. I always loved that experience: going and sitting in an auditorium and listening to their opinions.

I try really hard to ask people to take a look at their bookshelves. Are there female writers on it? Gay writers? Writers of color? There should be.

There are good writers and bad writers. It's hard to find writers who really speak to you, but the work is out there.

I think one of the most fertile, unexplored areas for poets and fiction writers is the world of science. I become overwhelmed by the science world.

A lot of artists use memories. A lot of prose writers, a lot of poets, a lot of songwriters, refer back to something. Generally it's all you've got, unless you're brilliant and can write totally in the now.

The only advice [for new writers and poets] I can offer is to be yourself: not the self someone else wants you to be, but the self you are. Enjoy yourself and your life. But most of all travel and eat. That's how we learn.

It is possible that scientists, poets, painters and writers are all members of the same family of people whose gift it is by nature to take those things which we call common-place and to 're-present' them to us - the world - in such ways that our self-imposed limitations are expanded.

Science will...produce the data..., but never the full meaning. For perceiving real significance, we shall need...most of all the brains of poets, [and] also those of artists, musicians, philosophers, historians, writers in general.

Good poets borrow; great poets steal.

One of the surest tests of the superiority or inferiority of a poet is the way in which a poet borrows. Immature poets imitate mature poets steal bad poets deface what they take and good poets make it into something better or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique utterly different than that from which it is torn the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion. A good poet will usually borrow from authors remote in time or alien in language or diverse in interest.

Most writers - poets in especial - prefer having it understood that they compose by a species of fine frenzy - an ecstatic intuition - and would positively shudder at letting the public take a peep behind the scenes.

Kabul was a thriving cosmopolitan city with its vibrant artistic, intellectual and cultural life. There were poets, musicians, and writers. There was also an influx of western culture, art, and literature in the '60s and '70s.

The poets are wrong of course […] But then poets are almost always wrong about facts. That's because they are not really interested in facts: only in truth: which is why the truth they speak is so true that even those who hate poets by simple and natural instinct are exalted and terrified by it.

I think Lindsay Kemp really introduced me to the work of Jean Genet, and through that, I kind of kept re-educating myself about other prose writers and poets.

Poets who are not interested in music are, or become, bad poets.

Some of us – poets are not exactly poets. We live sometimes – beyond the word.

Great Poets discover themselves. Little Poets have to be 'discovered' by somebody else.

I have more questions than answers in this world as do most poets and writers. The field of memory we exist in is absolutely encompassing and is both a question and answer. It is memory that provides the heart with impetus, fuels the brain, and propels the corn plant from seed to fruit.

Artists - musicians, painters, writers, poets - always seem to have had the most accurate perception of what is really going on around them, not the official version or the popular perception of contemporary life.

Rarest of the real poets are born poets. They are the oddballs, not the professors.

I want to be one of those people, be they writers, poets, musicians, who leaves clues for the next generation. The really good people leave clues that help feed the human race. That's my aspiration.

On Memorial Day, I don't want to only remember the combatants. There were also those who came out of the trenches as writers and poets, who started preaching peace, men and women who have made this world a kinder place to live.

Poets by Death are conquer'd but the wit Of poets triumphs over it.

There was no really good true war book during the entire four years of the war. The only true writing that came through during the war was in poetry. One reason for this is that poets are not arrested as quickly as prose writers.

Most poets who have little or nothing to say are concerned primarily with the way in which they say it ... if it is true that the style of a poem and the poem itself are one, ... it may be ... that the poets who have little or nothing to say are, or will be, the poets that matter.

Poets knew that isolation in nature, far from people and things man-made, was good for the soul, and he'd always identified with poets.

Good writers borrow from other writers. Great writers steal from them outright.

A lot of artists start out as failed poets, then move on to being failed short-story writers before they finally break through to the big time and become failed novelists.

We all dream profusely every night, yet by morning we've forgotten ninety percent of what went on. That's why poets are such important members of society. Poets remember our dreams for us.

Fiction is in danger of becoming a kind of poetry. Only other poets read it. Only other fiction writers care about it.

My life all-around is really different than a lot of other poets. Not poets that are parents, too, but just that I can hardly find anyone who works in the industries that I've worked in.

I was on television a couple of years ago and the reporter asked me, "How does it feel being on mainstream media? It's not often poets get on mainstream media." I said, "Well I think you're the dominant media, the dominant culture, but you're not the mainstream media. The mainstream media is still the high culture of intellectuals: writers, readers, editors, librarians, professors, artists, art critics, poets, novelists, and people who think. They are the mainstream culture, even though you may be the dominant culture."

All poets write bad poetry. Bad poets publish them, good poets burn them.

There are some fine books and essays about that. Lewis Hyde has written about alcoholism and poets and the role that society gives its writers - encouraging them to die.

When younger writers and poets, musicians and painters are weakened by a stemming of funds, they come to me saddened, not as full of dreams and excitement and ideas. I am then weakened and diminished, and made less rich.

Metaphor impinges on everything, allowing us - poets and non-poets alike - to experience and think about the world in fluid, unusual ways.

Without writers, none of the entertainment would exist. It starts with writers. Writers are the most important piece of the entire puzzle.

For poets (bear the word) Half-poets even, are still whole democrats.

You're...writing for other writers to an extent-the dead writers whose work you admire, as well as the living writers you like to read.

From the beginnings of literature, poets and writers have based their narratives on crossing borders, on wandering, on exile, on encounters beyond the familiar. The stranger is an archetype in epic poetry, in novels. The tension between alienation and assimilation has always been a basic theme.

Bad poets imitate, good poets steal.

Writers, particularly poets, always feel exiled in some way - people who don't exactly feel at home, so they try to find a home in language.

Sometimes the greatest love is not found in the dramatic scenes that poets and writers immortalize. Often, the greatest manifestations of love are the simple acts of kindness and caring we extend to those we meet along the path of life.

A cool & diversified version of a mix tape. The BreakBeat Poets is a thorough and complete summation of Golden Era writers who continue to build the scene of literary and performance poetry.

I have learned so much from working with other poets, travelling and reading with them, spending days discussing poems in progress. There is the sense that we are all, as writers, part of something which is more powerful than any of us.

There is a line from the Marina Tsvetaeva poem I'm so fond of: "In this most Christian of worlds/ All poets are Jews." What she means is that writers and artists are outside the normal flow of daily life, the normal flow of society in general.

Artist - musicians, painters, writers, poets, always seem to have had the most accurate perception of what is really going on around them, not the official version or the popular perception of contemporary life.

I feel like the writers that I'm drawn to, the writers that I really cling to, are the writers who seem to be writing out of a desperate act. It's like their writing is part of a survival kit. Those are the writers that I just absolutely cherish and carry with me everywhere I go.