Quotes About Perspective

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.

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

I am a guest of the French language. My poems in French are born of my interaction with the French language, which is not the same as that of a French poet.

Only the poet can look beyond the detail and see the whole picture.

In a way you can feel that the poet actually is looking over your shoulder, and you say to yourself, now, how would this go for him? Would this do or not?

I think a poet is anybody who wouldn't call himself a poet.

There is something about a poet which leads us to believe that he died, in many cases, as long as 20 years before his birth.

I'm not a journalist; I'm a poet.

A poet in history is divine, but a poet in the next room is a joke.

I never thought of myself as a New York poet or as an American poet.

But I'm too old to be written about as a young poet.

Well, I still write poetry, but I wouldn't call myself a poet.

I wouldn't be very happy if a poet read what I had written and said, 'What a peculiar thing to say about this work of mine.'

I believe the poet shouldn't be in the poem at all except as a lens or as ears.

Oh, I'm a pretty bad poet. This has been corroborated by others.

Every contemporary poet is a door to another poet.

My working habit is to separate my aims as a painting from my aims as a poet. They come from very different places and ultimately lead me to very different places... I'll leave what I mean by 'places' ambiguous.

I'm not literary, and I'm not academic, and I don't think like a poet, so my stuff will never be like that.

Everyone is their own kind of poet - you can't miss it when their words are written down.

Anyone who holds a pen these days thinks he or she is a poet.

What I wish I had, is that I wish I was a little more Greek, in that I wish I could lose my North American driven attitude and that I could be a little bit more poetic and laissez faire.

It's not often that scripts come across our desks that are written so poetic and so honest from our perspective, as a black man and a black woman in Hollywood.

The importance of poetry is not measured, finally, by what the poet says but by how he says it.

In fact a lot of them I think are absolute baloney. Those Charles Olsens and people like that. At first I was interested in seeing what they were up to, what they were doing, why they were doing it. They never moved me in the way that one is moved by true poetry.