Me Quotes

My father would tell me if I wasn't writing in meter verse, it wasn't poetry.

~ John Darnielle

My poems tend to be more celebratory and lyrical, and the novels so far pretty dark. Poetry doesn't seem to me to be an appropriate tool for exploring that.

~ John Burnside

When I was a young man, I understood that poetry was two things - it was difficult to understand, but you could understand that the poet was miserable. So for a while there, I wrote poems that were hard to understand, even by me, but gave off whiffs of misery.

~ Billy Collins

I always wrote poetry as a teenager and it was always so dark, but it made me feel good to get it out.

~ Pink

I grew up in a middle-class house without books, without art. No one around me wrote poetry or even read it.

~ Edward Hirsch

I didn't start off as a journalist; I started off as a poet. My ambition was to practise poetry. Then I found journalism, but that other voice never fled from me.

~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

As the years pass, I find that writers who were once central to me aren't anymore. I revered Yeats's poetry in college. I respect it now and am still ravished by certain lines, but I don't go back to him again and again. I do go back to Emily Dickinson again and again.

~ Margo Jefferson

Poetry was one of the things that interested me most as I was growing up. I used to write it in my head all the time. I still think the very greatest pleasure in life is to write a poem.

~ Claire Tomalin

Poetry is the hardest thing that there is. It fascinates me, so I want to write more of it.

~ Steve Earle

Becoming interested in poetics got me interested in theater. Theater is supposed to be poetry, you know, before it's anything else. It just doesn't fly if it isn't musical.

~ Steve Earle

I wrote poetry, which got me into lyrics. Stevie Wonder, Carole King, Elton John pulled me into pop. I started singing with a band - just for fun - when I was 17. And pretty soon, I was thinking I could sing pop in English as well as Spanish.

~ Gloria Estefan

'Milk and Honey' was written with me being honest to myself, kind of pulling at the things that I hear the most and saying that out loud, and you know, that thing that we hear the most is most universal, and so that rings true with all folks. The language used in the poetry is extremely, extremely accessible.

~ Rupi Kaur

For me, the power of the poetry in 'Milk and Honey' is the feeling you get after finished reading the poem. It's the emotion you feel once you've read the last word, and that is only possible when the diction is easy, and you don't get stuck on every other word, you don't know what the word means.

~ Rupi Kaur

As I grew older - collapsing into my seventies, glimpsing ahead the cliffs of the eighties, colliding into eighty-five - poetry abandoned me.

~ Donald Hall

Prose is not so dependent on sound. The line of poetry, with the breaking of the line - to me, sound is the kind of doorway into poetry. And my sense of sound, or my ability to control it, lapsed or grew less.

~ Donald Hall

I always read poetry before I write, to sensitize me to the rhythms and music of language.

~ Janet Fitch

The poetry that sustains me is when I feel that, for a minute, the clouds have parted and I've seen ecstasy or something.

~ Rita Dove

I think I felt at some point that I couldn't understand poetry or that it was beyond me or it didn't speak to my experience. I think that was because I hadn't yet found the right poems to invite me in.

~ Natasha Trethewey

My father, Eric Trethewey, is a poet, so I had one right inside the house. And on long trips, he'd tell me, if I got bored in the car, to write a poem about it. And I did find that poetry was a way for me, I think as it for a lot of people, to articulate those things that seem hardest to say.

~ Natasha Trethewey

The Language Poets are writing only about language itself. The Ashbery poets are writing only about poetry itself. That seems to me a kind of dead end.

~ Robert Morgan

The idea of avant-garde art is a very suspicious thing to me, the idea that poetry is new and it keeps being new the way Chevrolets every year are new.

~ Robert Morgan

And, I mean, I think poetry does need to be met to some extent, especially, I guess, 19th century poetry, and for me, it's just been so worth the effort. It's like I'm planting a garden in my head.

~ Jane Campion

Poetry is for me Eucharistic. You take someone else's suffering into your body, their passion comes into your body, and in doing that you commune, you take communion, you make a community with others.

~ Mary Karr

For me, poetry is a situation - a state of being, a way of facing life and facing history.

~ Tahar Ben Jelloun

San Diego shaped me a lot. The visual landscapes, the emotional panoramas, the teachers and mentors I had from the third grade through San Diego High - it's all a big part of the poetry fountain that I continue to drink from.

~ Juan Felipe Herrera

I'm not precisely saying that a really good board meeting at the MLA (Museums, Libraries and Archives Coucil) makes me want to go and write poetry, but there is a pleasure in doing that sort of thing well.

~ Andrew Motion

I got scouted for modeling on the street. I'm such a tomboy - still am. I just never thought about modeling before, but I thought, 'Ooh, interesting, similar world, perhaps it's a way into something.' Then, I was on my third photo shoot ever, and Adam Leech from 'Downtown Abbey' saw me reading poetry and asked me to recite some.

~ Anya Taylor-Joy

All through childhood, I wrote verses and mysteries. There is, for me, one connection: structure. My poetry is metrical, rhyming.

~ Sophie Hannah

I accept all interpretations of my films. The only reality is before the camera. Each film I make is kind of a return to poetry for me, or at least an attempt to create a poem.

~ Bernardo Bertolucci

To me, art begets art. Painting feeds the eye just as poetry feeds the ear, which is to say that both feed the soul.

~ Susan Vreeland

Poetry for me is as much a spiritual practice as sexual ecstasy is.

~ James Broughton

I wanted to write the kind of poetry that people read and remembered, that they lived by - the kinds of lines that I carried with me from moment to moment on a given day without even having chosen to.

~ Tracy K. Smith

Well, I write a lot of poetry - that's where it usually all starts. I definitely want to show you guys sides of me - love, loss, heartbreak - all of that good stuff!

~ Tristan Wilds

Let me embrace thee, sour adversity, for wise men say it is the wisest course.

~ William Shakespeare

I believe in the brotherhood of all men, but I don't believe in wasting brotherhood on anyone who doesn't want to practice it with me. Brotherhood is a two-way street.

~ Malcolm X

It disturbs me no more to find men base, unjust, or selfish than to see apes mischievous, wolves savage, or the vulture ravenous.

~ Jean-Paul Sartre

It has always been a mystery to me how men can feel themselves honoured by the humiliation of their fellow beings.

~ Mahatma Gandhi

I suppose I've always done my share of crying, especially when there's no other way to contain my feelings. I know that men ain't supposed to cry, but I think that's wrong. Crying's always been a way for me to get things out which are buried deep, deep down. When I sing, I often cry. Crying is feeling, and feeling is being human. Oh yes, I cry.

~ Ray Charles

I don't like the clean-shaven boy with the necktie and the good job. I like desperate men, men with broken teeth and broken minds and broken ways. They interest me. They are full of surprises and explosions.

~ Charles Bukowski

I know now that there are men out there who are, for me, the whole package, who are supportive of my successes because they know I will be just as supportive of theirs. I'm less tolerant of foolishness now; I know that it's important I not tie myself up with the wrong person, because then I will miss the right person coming along.

~ Ginnifer Goodwin