Quotes About Poets

I think poets are people who are like this; for whatever reason you feel psychological exile because you're always an outsider...

Why are poets so apt to choose their mates, not for any similarity of poetic endowment, but for qualities which might make the happiness of the rudest handicraftsman as well as that of the ideal craftsman of the spirit? Because, probably, at his highest elevation, the poet needs no human intercourse; but he finds it dreary to descend, and be a stranger.

People were usually much better in their letters than in reality. They were much like poets in this way.

all the poets wanted to get disability insurance it was better than immortality.

and I laugh, I can still laugh, who can't laugh when the whole thing is so ridiculous that only the insane, the clowns, the halfwits, the cheaters, the whores, the horseplayers, the bankrobbers, the poets... are interesting?

Love has traditionally been the domain of poets, artists, and philosophers, but in the last 50 years the terrain of relationships has increasingly been mapped by psychologists.

Real dreams are about seeing what others miss. If you have your head in the clouds, you can see the world more clearly. Maybe this is why so many poets and visionaries die young or drink heavily—it is painful when you can see the truth up close. It can be unbearable.

But as we all know, it is the fairy-tale creatures - the misfits, the weirdos, the wanderers, the flakes, the poets, the vagabonds, the idlers - who make life worth living.

Outlaws, like lovers, poets, and tubercular composers who cough blood onto piano keys, do their finest work in the slippery rays of the moon.

It is as if the soul of the continent is weeping. Why does it weep? It weeps for the bones of the buffalo. It weeps for magic that has been forgotten. It weeps for the decline of poets. It weeps for the black people who think like white people. It weeps for the Indians who think like settlers. It weeps for the children who think like adults. It weeps for the free who think like prisoners. Most of all, it weeps for the cowgirls who think like cowboys.

The young Efrainite poets got around the city on foot, or by bus ...Some of the Efrainites were belligerent and used to turn up at literary events to jeer, pass judgment ...

Well, we all start thinking we're going to be Romantic rock stars, but then reality hits and you realize no one reads you but other poets.

There was a distinct class of these gentlemen tramps, young men no longer young, who wouldn't settle down, who disliked polite society and the genteel conventions, but hadn't enough intelligence or enough conceit to think themselves transcendentalists or poets, in the style of Thoreau or of Walt Whitman.

It's well known that our inept homegrown police of all eras have always shown unerring taste in poets and writers - they always manage to kill the most talented and leave the most mediocre.

Sometimes the fresh load of guests would turn up before we had got rid of the previous group, and the chaos was indescribable; the house and garden would be dotted with poets, authors, artists, and playwrights arguing, painting, drinking, typing, and composing. Far from being the ordinary, charming people that Larry had promised, they all turned out to be the most extraordinary eccentrics who were so highbrow that they had difficulty in understanding one another.

There are two types of poets: People who write poetically about their lives, and poets that live poetically and write about it.

No future historian of the United States will be able to use quotations from her twentieth-century poets in support of an imperial policy of conquest and slaughter.

The poets think about war more than the social scientists.

I was at Harvard with a whole bunch of poets, and that was very rare. They published a lot of books because there was an excitement after the war that translated into poetry.

The great religions are the ships, Poets the life boats. Every sane person I know has jumped overboard.

Dreams are debris from bad day. Dreams are poems by bad poets that never got written.

At the time I was growing up, literature was involved with the so-called confessional poets. And I was not interested in that. I did not think that specific and personal perspective functioned well for the reader at all.

Mysticism, in the narrow sense, implies a specific experience which is foreign to most poets and most men, but on the other hand, it represents an instinct which is a human sine qua non.

Them lady poets must not marry, pal.