Quotes About Writing

Secretly, deep down, everybody on Earth believes they can write poetry, apart from the members of the Poets' Guild, who know they can't.

...few young poets [are] testing their poems against the ear. They're writing for the page, and the page, let me tell you, is a cold bed.

What is important-what lasts-in another language is not what is said but what is written. For the essence of an age, we look to its poetry and its prose, not its talk shows.

Poetry is written with tears, fiction with blood, and history with invisible ink.

I'm truly an outsider in the poetry world. When I started writing, I was trying to move my poems away from modernist lines.

I wanted to be a writer for a while. I was an excellent child writer. I won multiple poetry contests. I was published at age three - I think that was more about novelty than my immense talent.

The idea that a student can write a sonnet or a novel without having a sound understanding about its history, and where it fits into literature as a whole, seems to me to be manifestly daft.

I'd rather call prose poems something else, for clarity - something like "poetic prose," prose that contains a quality of poetry, but not poems.

I wanted to be a composer for a while, and for a while, and maybe still, I found writing music much easier than writing poetry. So maybe my brain clings to it.

To my mind, most prose poems are more prose than poetry. They don't possess most of the qualities of a poem.

Prose and poetry are as different as food and drink.

When I was sixteen, it was simple. Poetry existed; therefore it could be written; and nobody had told me — yet — the many, many reasons why it could not be written by me.

There's very little of the intentional about the business of writing poetry, as least as far as I can see.

I would say my life experiences are my poetry, whether I'm writing about those actual, factual experiences or not.

When anger and sorrow overflow, sometimes it becomes poetry.

One can be well-bred and write bad poetry

Indignation leads to the making of poetry. [Lat., Facit indignatio versum.]

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.

I write poetry. It comes naturally to me, but from a technical point of view it forces me to pay close attention to language and to scan.

I think that if poetry is not a personal act, it's a pamphlet.

When I first started to write poetry, I used to feel as if my tongue would go numb.

I don't write poetry for the New Yorker. My poems appear in the Nation, mostly.

I write poetry anyway and have for years and years. For me, putting fiction and poetry together is like the best of both worlds.

Until recently, I thought 'occasional poetry' meant that you wrote only occasionally.