Poetry Quotes - page 76

We're all just animals. That's all we are, and everything else is just an elaborate justification of our instincts. That's where music comes from. And romantic poetry. And bad novels. (Elvis Costello)
Poetry is a kind of ingenious nonsense (Spence, Anecdotes) View quote
Isaac Barrow
I have been writing poetry since 1975. My first poetry book was published in 1986. View quote
Taslima Nasrin
I'm not a great poetry fan. View quote
Rupert Everett
I want to write a play. I'd like to do an original musical. I should probably put together a poetry collection. View quote
Neil Gaiman
I wrote things for the school's newspaper, and - like all teenagers - I dabbled in poetry. View quote
Stephen Colbert
So poetry, which is in Oxford made An art, in London only is a trade. View quote
John Dryden
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. View quote
Thom Gunn
A magical portal opened inside my mind and conducted me into an astonishing world. [...] Before this moment I had divined but had never known with such positiveness that the world is extremely large and that suffering and toil are the companions and fellow warriors not only of Cretan, but of every man. [...] That by means of poetry all this suffering and effort could be transformed into dream; no matter how much of the ephemeral existed, poetry could immortalize it by turning it into song. View quote
Nikos Kazantzakis
I started out in life as a poet; I was only writing poetry all through my 20s. It wasn't until I was about 30 that I got serious about writing prose. While I was writing poems, I would often divert myself by reading detective novels; I liked them. View quote
Paul Auster
I guess I wanted to leave America for awhile. It wasn't that I wanted to become an expatriate, or just never come back, I needed some breathing room. I'd already been translating French poetry, I'd been to Paris once before and liked it very much, and so I just went. (Paul Auster)
I was always interested in French poetry sort of as a sideline to my own work, I was translating contemporary French poets. That kind of spilled out into translation as a way to earn money, pay for food and put bread on the table. View quote
Paul Auster
On all levels of life and as each day unfolds, respect for Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. grows impressively, and the essence of this respect is the fact that he had deeper insights than most of us have appreciated. It is not mere poetry to call him prophetic. View quote
Harry Belafonte
Off in his head, he solved extraordinary problems of mathematics, science, medicine, the humanities. He wrote poetry, saw music. ... People have told him, with your IQ you should be a genius. I was a genius and have long since abused myself into a state of average and like it better that way. Now there comes a momentary clearing, a moment of satorial splendor, and then it goes oblique. It fades away like blown dust. View quote
Robert Olmstead
Prose - it might be speculated - is discourse; poetry ellipsis. View quote
Joyce Carol Oates
When you are writing literary writing, you are communicating something subtextual with emotions and poetry. The prose has to have a voice; it's not just typing. It takes a while to get that voice. View quote
Joyce Carol Oates
Prose - it might be speculated - is discourse; poetry ellipsis. Prose is spoken aloud; poetry overheard. The one is presumably articulate and social, a shared language, the voice of "communication"; the other is private, allusive, teasing, sly, idiosyncratic as the spider's delicate web, a kind of witchcraft unfathomable to ordinary minds. View quote
Joyce Carol Oates
Love is poetry plus biology. View quote
Lawrence Durrell
...I engage with poetry musically. I think I hear the music of the poem before I put words to it. The poem comes to me as it were a song more than a string of words or images. If I can't transport that musical quality to the poem, then the poem doesn't exist for me...”. View quote
Lucha Corpi
I wake to "magnolias sweet and fresh", Lines of poetry on my breath, You were here but you have stolen away. My inspiration is an evening star, So come to me wherever you are, I will wait for you tonight alone in the dark... View quote
Greta Gaines
I decided that it was not wisdom that enabled poets to write their poetry, but a kind of instinct or inspiration, such as you find in seers and prophets who deliver all their sublime messages without knowing in the least what they mean. (Isocrates)
I'm fascinated by rap and by hip-hop. I think there's a lot of poetry in it. There's a lot of anger, a lot of social energy in it. And I think you'd better listen to it pretty carefully, 'cause it's important. View quote
John Kerry
As anthropomorphic and surreal people have said my early writing was, to me it was really stock and almost banal in the sense that it was just description, the poetry of comparing: 'Your feet are like A, and your eyes like B.' View quote
Devendra Banhart
It's always a combination of physics and poetry that I find inspiring. It's hard to wrap your head around things like the Hubble scope. View quote
Tom Hanks
Sometimes poetry, it is incomprehensible. But we need incomprehensible stuff! It is very healthy to talk about incomprehensible things! It is very healthy! We need it! View quote
Roberto Benigni