Quotes About Creativity

Ginsberg's Collected Poems contains a wonderful poem about making it with Neal Cassady.

But you'd have a job to find many of my poems which would seem to be very influenced by a particular person.

What we call a poem is mostly what is not there on the page. The strength of any poem is the poems that it has managed to exclude.

I wish I could write lyrical poems, but I just write the way they come.

The years rolled their brutal course down the hill of time. Still poor, my clothes still smelling of the horse barn, still writing those doubtful poems where too much emotion clashed with too many words.

I think of myself as a writer who photographs. Images, for me, can be considered poems, short stories or essays. And I've always thought the best place for my photographs was inside books of my own creation.

I have been writing songs and poems since I was a little girl. I started writing short scripts, which evolved into the idea for a book.

I started out in graduate school to be a fiction writer. I thought I wanted to write short stories. I started writing poems at that point only because a friend of mine dared me to write a poem. And I took the dare because I was convinced that I couldn't write a good poem... And then it actually wasn't so bad.

I wish I'd been better able to resist the sense of obligation to write some of the poems I did. It's in the nature of commissioned work to be written too much from the side of your mind that knows what it's doing, which dries up the poetry.

I had always written. I had written stories and poems. Then I started writing plays.

I've been writing poems and stories since I was about 13.

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.

When I was one day old, I learned how to read. When I was two days old, I started to write. By the time I was three, I had finished 212 short stories, 38 novels, 730 poems, and one very funny limerick, all before breakfast.

I do think that all of us think in poems.

Heartbreak was the impetus to me writing poems and music in the first place.

Artists and writers have to deal with the element that makes the real real and the dream real while you are dreaming it. That's where stories and poems get their power.

I always write stories, and I write poems, too. I just never sell them to anybody, but I write them. They're good, too. They never leave the house. They're too disclosing.

So many poems you go into and come up empty.

All poems say the same thing, and each poem is unique. Each part reproduces the others, and each part is different.

It's difficult to learn poems off by heart that don't rhyme.

Since the age of 11, I have loved writing poems and fragments from my life.

I had been writing poems and stories since I learned to make letters. I had placed poems in a hardcover anthology at the age of 6. And I knew more big words than anyone else in the 10th grade.

I don't think I've ever written a poem whose intention was just to be funny. I've written poems that start out funny and often shift into something more serious.

With fiction, I tend to get to my desk and start writing. Poetry I write in my head, often while walking, so that my poems have an organic quality, hopefully.