Quotes About Inspiration

I started to write my own stories, like small novels, and those novels became poems, and after poems, they became lyrics, and song came from that.

Poems evolve. I don't feel like I choose them; they just come to me.

Even when I was in school, I was doing papers and writing poems; I always had an edge to my delivery. It was never conscious, but it was more so my organic way of thinking about things.

Sometimes, for me, lyrics are derived from poems that I'm working on, and they kind of cross back and forth between the two.

People called me Cilla when I was little because I was always singing and writing poems.

I was living in Britain and then America, but it wasn't until I returned to live in Ireland in the late '70s that I really became aware of Seamus Heaney. I discovered quickly that his poems are very accessible.

I write poems.

If you sit down to write a limerick, you find yourself straddling two histories: the history of the limerick form itself, which stretches back to at least the 11th century, and your personal history of knowing limericks or poems similar to limericks.

When I was young, I would write all the time. Novels, plays, and poems. It's like a disease - my life is filled with fantasies, and I have to write them all down.

Everybody that read one of my poems went off and wrote poetry. They said that about the Velvets, didn't they? They didn't sell many records, but everybody that saw them formed a band.

I have to thank my mother for this. When I was a little boy she used to teach me poems. I would go in church and tell the poems in church for the Easter program, and again for Mother's Day and any occasion she felt would fit. I was very energetic with delivery at that time as a boy, so it stuck with me.

There are two men inside the artist, the poet and the craftsman. One is born a poet. One becomes a craftsman.

I read Rumi, the 13th-century Persian poet, every day.

An actor is at most a poet and at least an entertainer.

And muse on Nature with a poet's eye.

I shall, in due time, be a Poet.

No one ever was a great poet, that applied himself much to anything else.

I'm a poet, first and foremost as a writer. That's who I am. That's what I'm most comfortable writing.

I've always tried to be a poet more than anything else. I mean, professional musicians die.

If I'm the people's poet, then I ought to be in people's hands - and, I hope, in their heart.

For the poet the credo or doctrine is not the point of arrival but is, on the contrary, the point of departure for the metaphysical journey.

Is encouragement what the poet needs? Open question. Maybe he needs discouragement. In fact, quite a few of them need more discouragement, the most discouragement possible.

I would like to be a philosopher in ancient Athens and a poet in ancient China.

I earn more than I thought I would when I became a poet.