Quotes About Literature

But the more poetry one reads the more one longs to read!

Satire is a kind of poetry in which human vices are reprehended.

Nine-tenths of English poetic literature is the result either of vulgar careerism or of a poet trying to keep his hand in. Most poets are dead by their late twenties.

The Old Testament is full of poetry, prophecies, chronicles, documentations, storytelling, fairytales.

Otherwise I don't read much adult poetry at all, because I'm not smart enough and mostly I don't get it.

A bard whom there were none to praise, And very few to read.

I have always loved American poetry, which is very different from Irish poetry.

I believe that the short story is as different a form from the novel as poetry is, and the best stories seem to me to be perhaps closer in spirit to poetry than to novels.

When I really want to be soothed and reminded of why people bother to fiddle with sentences, I often read poetry.

Fiction is in danger of becoming a kind of poetry. Only other poets read it. Only other fiction writers care about it.

My business is words. Words are like labels, or coins, or better, like swarming bees.

Mr Witwould: "Pray, madam, do you pin up your hair with all your letters? I find I must keep copies." Mrs Millamant: "Only with those in verse.... I never pin up my hair with prose."

I have been eating poetry.

The only people who have trouble with poetry are the people who link it with literature. It's much more akin to mountain-walking, and dancing by yourself at 2 A.M.

The translator of prose is the slave of the author, and the translator of poetry is his rival.

My wife has a beastly habit of comparing poetry -- all literature in fact -- to the droppings of the goats among the rocks -- mere excreta that fertilises the ground it falls on.

Poetry should be common in experience but uncommon in books.

I consider poetry very subordinate to moral and political science.

Our most famous writers are Faulkner and Eudora Welty and Flannery O'Connor. It would make sense that the poetry would reflect some of those same values, some of the same techniques.

Sir, I admit your general rule, That every poet is a fool, But you yourself may serve to show it, That every fool is not a poet.

Who would not spout the family teapot in order to talk with Keats for an hour about poetry, or with Jane Austen about the art of fiction?

Fiction will always be my greatest love, with poetry close behind.

England still waits for the supreme moment of her literature--for the great poet who shall voice her, or, better still, for the thousand little poets whose voices shall pass into our common talk.

He says his aim is poetry. One does not aim at poetry with pistols. At poets, perhaps.