You Quotes

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

Instead of trying to come up and pontificate on what literature is, you need to talk with children, to teachers, and make sure they get poetry in the curriculum early.

~ Rita Dove

You don't have to be a renowned artist like Q-Tip to try your hand at poetry. You don't need any special equipment - that's the beauty of it.

~ Michelle Obama

I've been reading poetry publicly for 20 years, and this is what you do - you express, you sometimes dig a bit to get a conversation started. That's the point of poetry. You're supposed to go, 'Hmmmm,' and 'Woooh!'

~ Jill Scott

My idea is simply - is very simple - is that the books of poetry should be published in far greater volume and be distributed in far greater volume, in far more substantial manner. You can sell in supermarkets very cheaply. In paperbacks. You can sell in drugstores.

~ Joseph Brodsky

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.

~ Joyce Carol Oates

For awhile after you quit Keats all other poetry seems to be only whistling or humming.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

Well you can't teach the poetry, but you can teach the craft.

~ David Hockney

Poetry is always slightly mysterious, and you wonder what is your relationship to it.

~ Seamus Heaney

The experiment of poetry, as far as I am concerned, happens when the poem carries you beyond where you could have reasonably expected to go.

~ Seamus Heaney

I learn poetry, learn text, and that really keeps you alive.

~ Anthony Hopkins

It's something we, guys, have all done. Made tapes for girls, trying to impress them, to meet them on a shared plane of aesthetics. Read them someone else's poetry because they do poetry better than you could do it, because you're too awkward to do it.

~ John Cusack

When you act, you've got to be like a poet or a musician. It's not about evidence before court. It's not a forensic subject. It's poetry; it's a completely different place.

~ Rhys Ifans

If you want to see mankind fully, look at a family. Within the family minds become organically one, and for this reason the family is total poetry.

~ Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

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

You don't have to live in a garage to write great poetry.

~ Felix Dennis

You're shadowed by your own dream, especially as you get older, of trying to create something that will last in poetry. And so, you're working on its behalf.

~ Edward Hirsch

I don't think you can read poetry while you're watching television very well.

~ Edward Hirsch

All one's inventions are true, you can be sure of that. Poetry is as exact a science as geometry.

~ Gustave Flaubert

I used to buy scented poetry books on tour and read aloud to the band. Not what you'd expect, huh?

~ Suzi Quatro

You can be intuitive when you've got a more expansive role. You can get into the poetry of telling the story rather than just pushing buttons.

~ Willem Dafoe

I've always felt that poetry was particularly erotic, more than prose was... I say that you read poems not with your eyes and not with your ears, but with your mouth. You taste it.

~ Donald Hall

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

~ Daniel Woodrell

You have to learn a few things, which you do along the way, but basically, poetry is a matter of the ear. Iambic pentameters or what constitutes a stanza comes naturally - your ears will know.

~ Vikram Seth

You know, I can imagine not writing a novel and writing poetry only.

~ Vikram Seth

I don't think poetry is something that can be taught. We can encourage young writers, but what you can't teach them is the very essence of poetry.

~ Robert Morgan

One of the most powerful devices of poetry is the use of distortions. You can go from talking about the way a minute passes to the way a century passes, or a lifetime.

~ Robert Morgan

Poetry always runs away from you - it's very difficult to grasp it, and every time you read it, depending on your conditions, you will have a different grasp of it. Whereas with a novel, once you have read it, you have grasped it.

~ Abbas Kiarostami

Poetry is really about your mental state or intellectual, and where you are, and you're trying to evoke that, explain it to yourself, whatever, you're trying to dig into it, analyse yourself.

~ Jonathan Galassi

I love poetry; it's my primary literary interest, and I suppose the kind of reading you do when you are reading poems - close reading - can carry over into how you read other things.

~ Jonathan Galassi

You will not find poetry anywhere unless you bring some of it with you.

~ Joseph Joubert

In a general way, I want to be a kind of flag-waver, bunting hanger-up, drum-beater, you name it, for poetry.

~ Andrew Motion

The first function of poetry is to tell the truth, to learn how to do that, to find out what you really feel and what you really think.

~ June Jordan

If you read quickly to get through a poem to what it means, you have missed the body of the poem.

~ M. H. Abrams

No, what I should really like to do right now, in the full blaze of lights, before this illustrious assembly, is to shower every one of you with gifts, with flowers, with offerings of poetry - to be young once more, to ride on the crest of the wave.

~ Knut Hamsun

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

~ Stéphane Mallarmé

A poem can have an impact, but you can't expect an audience to understand all the nuances.

~ Douglas Dunn

Watches are the only jewelry men can wear, unless you're Mr. T.

~ Gordon Bethune

Passion is what gets you through the hardest times that might otherwise make strong men weak, or make you give up.

~ Neil Degrasse Tyson

You will kill 10 of our men, and we will kill 1 of yours, and in the end it will be you who tire of it.

~ Hồ Chí Minh