Pentameter Quotes

I would talk in iambic pentameter if it were easier. (Howard Nemerov)

It's good to have a lot of once-in-a-lifetimes in your lifetime. If you get the chance to skydive, go skydiving. If you're offered a part in a weird Shakespeare play in San Diego, slap on some tights and rock out some iambic pentameter.

Neil Patrick Harris

Just breathe at the end of the line or on the punctuation. If you lose that, and lose the iambic pentameter, you'll lose all the sense of what you're saying. And if you do breathe, you'll find that Shakespeare's verse is like a surfboard.

Orson Welles

If the English version is in what, in our youth, we used to speak of affectionately as dear old iambic pentameter, the actors mercifully abstain from reciting it that way; they speak their lines as good, hardy prose.

Dorothy Parker

I think what holds a poem like this together for me, if it's held together, is largely meter; this one is in iambic pentameter and iambic pentameter whatever else it is, can be a very good glue. It is a very good way to hold things together. It's like 4:4 you know.

Robert Pinsky

In the hexameter rises the fountain's silvery column; In the pentameter aye falling in melody back.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

With Shakespeare, if you're not going to do the iambic pentameter, do some other play.

John C. McGinley

Shakespeare wrote his sonnets within a strict discipline, fourteen lines of iambic pentameter, rhyming in three quatrains and a couplet. Were his sonnets dull Mozart wrote his sonatas within an equally rigid discipline - exposition, development, and recap.

David Ogilvy

You know, I used to say, when people say, 'How do you think about what to write about in the poems every week?' And I say, 'Well, I have to turn it in on Monday, so on Sunday nights I turn the shower to iambic pentameter and it sort of works out that way.'

Calvin Trillin