Quotes About Literature

Poets are seen as the caretakers of language, so working with words no matter what the form is what we do.

I didn't know any poets growing up in Kansas.

I'm ashamed to admit that I very seldom read poetry, even though many of my friends are poets.

Maybe there are three or four really good poets in a generation.

Francis Webb is easily our greatest poet and one of the greatest poets in the world but he's hardly ever mentioned.

America may have great poets and novelists, but she never will have more than one necromancer.

Of poets I put Virgil first - he was greatest.

The American public does not know poets exist.

I put it to you that there are no British poets, there are no British novelists. I have heard myself described as one, but I think really I'm an English novelist; there are Scottish poets and Scottish novelists.

Many good poets are really essayists who write very short essays.

Novelists and poets have existed side by side forever.

I find a lot of poetry very disappointing, but I do have poets that I go back to. One book of poetry that I'd like to mention is 'The Exchange' by Sophie Cabot Black. Her poems are difficult without being too difficult.

Poetry itself hasn't been well served by poets who fled to the margins.

Alice Oswald. With Hughes and Heaney gone, people are looking around for the best British and Irish poets. Oswald is one of our finest.

Not many poets have editors.

I have never felt inhibited in trying to write as well as the greatest English poets.

It's very important to say that French doesn't belong to France and to French people. Now you have very wonderful poets and writers in French who are not French or Algerian - who are from Senegal, from Haiti, from Canada, a lot of parts of the world.

One of my very favourite poets was a Massachusetts poet named Robert Lowell.

I grew up in Banaras on Kabir and other Hindi poets and then I got introduced to Faiz, Hasrat Mohani, Allama Iqbal and Majaaz. They took me to another facet of literature and drama.

Memoir is a difficult literary form to pull off when dealing with discrete and poignant moments in a life, even harder when seeking to narrate over 80 years of existence.

The social scene at the Harvard I knew was outside the rules of literature. It was less poignant.

I identify entirely with Jane Austen's point of view, on everything.

I find it to be easier to write from a man's point of view.

You can examine the whole 19th century from the point of view of who would have maxed out their credit cards. Emma Bovary would have maxed hers out. No question. Mr. Scrooge would not have. He would have snipped his up.