Quotes About Insight

I've always thought my poems told stories.

I like poems that are complex.

That sense of mystery, but also of revelation, is what I turn to poems for. They're able to embody experience. We need more and more of that.

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

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

The poet is on the side of undeceiving the world.

The eye is the notebook of the poet.

Sometimes poetry is inspired by the conversation entered into by reading other poems.

Poetry is what Milton saw when he went blind.

To know anything of a poet but his poetry is, so far as the poetry is concerned, to know something that may be entertaining, even delightful, but is certainly inessential.

Poets are Damned... but See with the Eyes of Angels.

I know who the great poets are.

I can't look at things in the simple, large way that great poets do.

The American public does not know poets exist.

Many good poets are really essayists who write very short essays.

Poets, for example, are generally considered starry-eyed and sensitive, but only by those who have never encountered one.

With poets, the choice of words is invariably more telling than the story line; that's why the best of them dread the thought of their biographies being written.

In reading, we are both scientists and poets.

I'm not a historian. I know historians. I've worked with them. They have a really powerful way of looking at the world, and I think so do poets.

The first point of wisdom is to discern that which is false; the second, to know that which is true.

As a point guard, I'm a coach on the floor. I know that.

I played point guard in the past and I know myself.

I define myself from a vision, from a point of view of life.

An outsider's point of view is always handy.