People Quotes

So now I have a collection of poetry by Aaron Neville and I give it to people I want to share it with. I'd like to publish it someday.

~ Aaron Neville

I think of it this way: When you hear that people have downloaded your comic, appreciate that thousands are eager to hear what you have to say. The poetry club down the hall may not have the same problem. That's a good problem to have.

~ Mark Waid

I have my Poetry 180 project, which I've made my main project. We encourage high schools, because that's really where, for most people, poetry dies off and gets buried under other adolescent pursuits.

~ Billy Collins

People think of poetry as a school subject... Poetry is very frustrating to students because they don't have a taste for ambiguity, for one thing. That gives them a poetry hangover.

~ Billy Collins

You know that thing people say, 'poetry is the hardest, stories are the second hardest, novels are the easiest?' I'm here to tell you that novels are the hardest. Writing a novel is unbelievably difficult. It's nightmarish.

~ Ethan Canin

I want to prove that if you write in strict meter and rhyme about subjects people care about, they will buy poetry.

~ Felix Dennis

With a poetry book I can send 100 copies out to reviewers and other people, and even do it in advance and get their response. It's difficult with iPad: how do you send it out for free, and how do you even disseminate it before it goes into their store?

~ Felix Dennis

I'd say people do need some help with poetry because I think poetry just helps takes us to places that Americans aren't always accustomed to going.

~ Edward Hirsch

Poetry is meant to inspire readers and listeners, to connect them more deeply to themselves even as it links them more fully to others. But many people feel put off by the terms of poetry, its odd vocabulary, its notorious difficulty.

~ Edward Hirsch

People want poetry. They need poetry. They get it. They don't want fancy work.

~ Mary Oliver

Gregory Corso used to get really pissed when people called Bob Dylan a 'poet.' After writing poetry for a few years, I can understand that.

~ Steve Earle

Deals are my art form. Other people paint beautifully on canvas or write wonderful poetry. I like making deals, preferably big deals. That's how I get my kicks.

~ Ed Koch

When it comes to poetry, I think partly the numbers of people attempting to write poems is probably a result or the reaction to technology.

~ Donald Hall

I think one of the things that people tend to forget is that poets do write out of life. It isn't some set piece that then gets put up on the shelf, but that the impetus, the real instigation for poetry is everything that's happening around us.

~ Rita Dove

Not too many people know it, but when I was in junior high, I was a pretty tough kid and was the leader of a street gang. Well, OK, it was less a street gang than an Ecology Club. We were pretty intimidating, though, and had our own meeting room until we got run out of there by a bunch of thugs from the Poetry Society.

~ W. Bruce Cameron

I think people turn to poetry more often than they think they do, or encounter it in more ways than they think that they do. I think we forget the places that we encounter it, say, in songs or in other little bits and pieces of things that we may have remembered from childhood.

~ Natasha Trethewey

I've been most happy to be an advocate for the kinds of grassroots things that people are doing who care about poetry.

~ Natasha Trethewey

I have a band called M&O. We were working on our first album in 2011 or 2012. We were looking for people to collaborate with, and I met Chance through a Young Chicago Authors poetry slam.

~ Jamila Woods

My artistic manifesto exists in the world as poetry. So even though most of the things that I've done have been on other people's projects or could be pigeonholed in certain ways, that's not how I perceive myself.

~ Jamila Woods

Some people swear by writing courses, but whether it really helps American poetry, I have doubts.

~ Robert Morgan

Some people think that English poetry begins with the Anglo-Saxons. I don't, because I can't accept that there is any continuity between the traditions of Anglo-Saxon poetry and those established in English poetry by the time of, say, Shakespeare. And anyway, Anglo-Saxon is a different language, which has to be learned.

~ James Fenton

In Arlington, people would laugh at you if you tried to get people to look at your drawings or listen to your poetry. It was like you thought you were special.

~ Eileen Myles

The biggest problem is people are afraid of poetry, think they can't understand it or that it will be boring.

~ Caroline Kennedy

Reading a piece of poetry with no beat in front of 20 people is way more challenging than rocking for 10,000 people.

~ Macklemore

I definitely used to write a lot at school. Comic poetry and drawings about people.

~ Sally Phillips

All voices are important, and yet it seems that people of color have a lot to say, particularly if you look through the poetry of young people - a lot of questions and a lot of concerns about immigration and security issues, you name it - big questions.

~ Juan Felipe Herrera

Poetry, as odd as it is, and as hard to figure out as it is, many times, it's almost something that we're used to. It's kind of like a dream language that we had centuries ago, so that when we speak poetically or write a poem about what's going on, a real difficult issue that's facing our communities, people listen.

~ Juan Felipe Herrera

The banner of the project is 'Casa de Colores.' Under that banner, I'm going to invite people to do a lot of good things. Perhaps working in groups, working on poetry.

~ Juan Felipe Herrera

It's like I understand images and some people understand poetry.

~ Samantha Morton

It's bad poetry executed by people that can't sing. That's my definition of Rap.

~ Peter Steele

Poetry is at the centre of my life, too, emotionally speaking, and intellectually speaking - it's just that I'm one of those people who enjoy doing other stuff as well.

~ Andrew Motion

If you put a real leaf and a silk leaf side by side, you'll see something of the difference between Homer's poetry and anyone else's. There seem to be real leaves still alive in the 'Iliad,' real animals, real people, real light attending everything.

~ Alice Oswald

You don't help people in your poems. I've been trying to help people all my life - that's my trouble.

~ Charles Olson

There'll always be working people in my poems because I grew up with them, and I am a poet of memory.

~ Philip Levine

The same people who are murdered slowly in the mechanized slaughterhouses of work are also arguing, singing, drinking, dancing, making love, holding the streets, picking up weapons and inventing a new poetry.

~ Raoul Vaneigem

There is the view that poetry should improve your life. I think people confuse it with the Salvation Army.

~ John Ashbery

I've been surprised to learn how many people love poetry. It's beautiful to see that people want poetry in their lives.

~ Peleg Top

It's always good to show that poetry isn't the little depressed lyric people believe it to be, that it's something bigger.

~ John Fuller

These people are very unskilled in arms... with 50 men they could all be subjected and made to do all that one wished.

~ Christopher Columbus

People who have no hold over their process of thinking are likely to be ruined by liberty of thought. If thought is immature, liberty of thought becomes a method of converting men into animals.

~ Muhammad Iqbal