Words Quotes

There are 30,000 days in your life. When I was 24, I realized I'm almost 9,000 days down. There are no warm-ups, no practice rounds, no reset buttons. Your biggest risk isn't failing, it's getting too comfortable. Every day, we're writing a few more words of a story. I wanted my story to be an adventure and that's made all the difference.

~ Drew Houston

I was so embarrassed about mispronouncing words. I just knew how to smile.

~ Adriana Lima

So the lover must struggle for words.

~ T. S. Eliot

You do your work as a photographer and everything becomes past. Words are more like thoughts; the photographer's picture is always surrounded by a kind of romantic glamor - no matter what you do, and how you twist it.

~ Robert Frank

When I start to write, words have become physical presence. It was to see if I could bring that private world to life that found its first expression through reading. I really dislike the romantic notion of the artist.

~ John Mcgahern

Words of love, are works of love.

~ William R. Alger

Poetry is a form of mathematics, a highly rigorous relationship with words.

~ Tahar Ben Jelloun

In other words the pictures are in a kind of relationship with each other which is touching only at points rather than pictures being illustrations of poems or poems extrapolations of the pictures.

~ Peter Porter

In the grip of a neurological disorder, I am fast losing control of words even as my relationship with the world has been reduced to them.

~ Christopher Hitchens

If you ask me to describe my relationship, I mean - words are too clumsy to accurately describe how I feel in that regard, particularly in an interview. It's a strange thing.

~ Ryan Reynolds

The relationship with the words someone uses is more intimate and integrated than just a quick read and a blurb can ever be. This intimacy - the words on the page being sent back and forth from engaged editor to open author - is unique in my experience.

~ Alice Sebold

Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words.

~ Robert Frost

Poetry is thoughts that breathe, and words that burn.

~ Thomas Gray

Poetry involves the mysteries of the irrational perceived through rational words.

~ Vladimir Nabokov

In poetry, you must love the words, the ideas and the images and rhythms with all your capacity to love anything at all.

~ Wallace Stevens

I think the first time I really heard poetry was in the schoolyard. Just the little limericks that kids say when they're jumping rope and playing games. I think that's the first time I heard rhyming words - I don't know if I'd call that the definitive poetry, but that's when I heard rhyming words said and not necessarily sung.

~ Jill Scott

A theology should be like poetry, which takes us to the end of what words and thoughts can do.

~ Karen Armstrong

I wish our clever young poets would remember my homely definitions of prose and poetry; that is, prose = words in their best order; - poetry = the best words in the best order.

~ Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Have you ever heard a good joke? If you've ever heard someone just right, with the right pacing, then you're already on the way to poetry. It's about using words in very precise ways and using gesture.

~ Rita Dove

Like most lit nerds, I'm a voracious reader. I never got enough poetry under my belt growing up but I do read it - some of my favorites, Gina Franco and Angela Shaw and Cornelius Eady and Kevin Young, remind me daily that unless the words sing and dance, what's the use of putting them down on paper.

~ Junot Díaz

Poetry is ordinary language raised to the Nth power. Poetry is boned with ideas, nerved and blooded with emotions, all held together by the delicate, tough skin of words.

~ Paul Engle

Writing poetry makes you intensely conscious of how words sound, both aloud and inside the head of the reader. You learn the weight of words and how they sound to the ear.

~ Helen Dunmore

I want to promote poetry to the point where you got all the baldhead kids running around doing poetry, getting the music out of the way and having only words, the spoken word, and then see what happens.

~ Russell Simmons

I'm happy to be a writer - of prose, poetry, every kind of writing. Every person in the world who isn't a recluse, hermit or mute uses words. I know of no other art form that we always use.

~ Maya Angelou

Poetry and lyrics are very similar. Making words bounce off a page.

~ Taylor Swift

As an actor, there is room for a certain amount of creativity, but you're always ultimately going to be saying somebody else's words. I don't think I'd have the stamina, skill or ability to write a novel, but I'd love to write short stories and poetry, because those are my two passions.

~ Daniel Radcliffe

I don't think of poetry as a 'rational' activity but as an aural one. My poems usually begin with words or phrases which appeal more because of their sound than their meaning, and the movement and phrasing of a poem are very important to me.

~ Margaret Atwood

Being able to say something lyrically, to say something that will do more than just be words, is really hard. It's easy to do when you're writing a chapter of a book or writing poetry, but it's really hard to do when you're confined to a melody line.

~ Nikki Sixx

I certainly derived my skills as a prose writer from my scrutiny of poetry and of the individual word. But schools don't do things like that anymore - tracking words down to their roots.

~ Camille Paglia

You pick up loads of baggage with your first record with reaction to it from fans and critics. So I went to Ireland by myself for a couple of weeks with my guitar. I read lots of poetry, I read Patti Smith's autobiography and started words and phrases and then songs started to take shape.

~ Ellie Goulding

When poetry separates from song, then the words have to carry all the rhythm themselves; they have to do all the work. They can't rely on the singing voice.

~ Edward Hirsch

One of the things that distinguishes poetry from ordinary speech is that in a very few number of words, poetry captures some kind of deep feeling, and rhythm is the way to get there. Rhythm is the way the poetry carries itself.

~ Edward Hirsch

'Words and Music' on Radio 3 is always a treat. Actors read passages of poetry and prose interspersed with music, and nobody tells you what it is. Later you can look it up online, but at the time you can't cheat.

~ Claire Tomalin

When poetry is on the money, 12 words can slay you. I admire that greatly.

~ Daniel Woodrell

Somehow, the words don't have any vitality, any life to them, unless I can feel it marking on a paper. That's how I start. Once I'm off, then I switch to the laptop. I think it would all just be prose if it started on a laptop - not that what I do is poetry.

~ Simon Schama

I love to compare different time frames. Poetry can evoke the time of the subject. By a very careful choice of words you can evoke an era, completely throw the poem into a different time scale.

~ Robert Morgan

Children seem naturally drawn to poetry - it's some combination of the rhyme, rhythm, and the words themselves.

~ Jack Prelutsky

You don't make a poem with ideas, but with words.

~ Stéphane Mallarmé

Freedom is poetry, taking liberties with words, breaking the rules of normal speech, violating common sense. Freedom is violence.

~ Norman O. Brown

Poetry is an orphan of silence. The words never quite equal the experience behind them.

~ Charles Simic