Quotes About Impact

The number of people who read a poem is not as important as how the poem affects those who read it.

For me, to have had an impact with anything that you've done, whether it's a painting, a photo, a poem, or something that you've created, just that experience is enormous. You don't get that all the time.

When I was a kid, a pickleball hit me in the back of the head, and I had memory problems. I was in a boarding school and the nuns gave me poems to remember to try and get the memory going again.

If I were brave enough to say so, I'd like to think that I had written some poems that people are not going to forget.

I seem to keep returning to my father in poems because his personality was so extreme, so driven. He did everything to excess.

Garrison Keillor read several of my poems on 'The Writer's Almanac' and I've heard from listeners nationally and internationally. That's one of the great gifts of email.

I love my funny poems, but I'd rather break your heart. And if I can do both in the same poem, that's the best.

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.

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

Are you really going to see Lewis? One of the few people it's worth getting excited over, I think. I know he is a good poet. I daresay he never heard of me, but I wish you would tell him that his work is the joy of my life.

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

Poetry is a call to action, and it also is action.

When Auden said his poetry didn't save one Jew from the gas chamber, he'd said it all.

A book is sent out into the world, and there is no way of fully anticipating the responses it will elicit. Consider the responses called forth by the Bible, Homer, Shakespeare - let alone contemporary poetry or a modern novel.

I don't think the creative writing industry has helped American poetry.

Even the greatest poets, I think, cannot quite get to the places that music can get to in the human - I was gonna say mind, but it's actually the entire body. It somehow seems to infuse the entire body.

Poets often are dealing with history and are thinking about the way history moves across us, and we move in it.

You constantly have to take inventory, not get on someone else's agenda. You want to write something that's poignant and moves people.

Once you see the leader of the team, the point guard of the team who has the ball pretty much the whole time in the game directing everybody, I think it just rubs off on everybody.

If you're not a scoring point guard, people don't think of you as highly. They don't think of you as the type that's going to make an impact in college because you're not trying to score 20 points a game. You're more trying to get 10 assists.

When you do something in a nonviolent way, people will die and there will be casualties. But you're taking a different point of view that has a power.

'Vicky Donor' is now seen as a case study and the intelligentsias are looking at it from a strong academic point of view. I keep getting calls from medical practitioners who constantly thank me for making this film.

When 'Himmatwala' didn't work, the negativity factor attached to the reviews were more pointed towards me. That's when I realized, that something has gone wrong.

Every day, I get up, and I fill the bird feeders and put out fruit and other food for both the birds and any passing mammals. Is that pointless long-term? I have no idea. All I know is that on this day, in this moment, it makes a difference.