Best 1314 quotes in «poet quotes» category

How does the poet transform his banal thoughts (are not most thoughts banal?) into such stunning forms, into beauty?

How far we are going to read a poet when we can read about a poet is a problem to lay before biographers.

How many modern transsexuals are unacknowledged shamans? Perhaps it is to poets they should go for counsel, rather than surgeons.

How do you define a poet? It's very simple. Anyone declaring that he is a poet, is a poet.

I acknowledge immense debt to the griots [tribal poets] of Africa - where today it is rightly said that when a griot dies, it is as if a library has burned to the ground.

- How is he in bed? Gladiator or poet? - Hmmm... A poetic gladiator.

I alwaysthought of myself as a competent, minor poet. I know who I'm up against.

I actually very rarely see comedy myself, and although I admire the work of some comics, it does come from all over, so I’ll get a charge out of some fiction writers and poets.

I am a black woman poet and I sound like one.

I am a poet who composes what life proses, and who proses what life composes.

I am a revolutionary, so my son can be a farmer, so his son can be a poet.

I am not as these are, the poet saithIn youth's pride, and the painter, among menAt bay, where never pencil comes nor pem

I am not less poet; I am more conscious of all that I am, am not, and might become.

How much money you get, depends on lots of extraneous things. It depends on how good you are at turning poetry into a marketable product, which is something it was never supposed to be. That's why many people suppose that the better the poet you are the lower your income should be, and that's probably true.

I am the scroll of the poet behind which samurai swords are being sharpened.

I am the poet of the high wire - I never do stunts; I do theatrical performances.

I also discovered that I was a poet. From the standpoint of one's family this is probably a regrettable discovery.

I beg your pardon: correct English is the slang of prigs who write history and essays. And the strongest slang of all is the slang of poets.

How poetry comes to the poet is a mystery.

I carry my unwritten poems in cipher on my face!

I consider myself a poet first and a musician second. I live like a poet and I'll die like a poet.

I'd better be a poet Or lay down dead.

I believed that I wanted to be a poet, but deep down I wanted to be a poem.

I became a poet at the age of sixteen. I did not intend to do it. It was not my fault.

I don't call myself a poet, because I don't like the word.

I'd rather be a great bad poet than a good bad poet.

I defer to all these other American poets who, for some reason, I both envy and admire.

I don't like the stigma that comes with being called a poet . . . So I call what I'm doing an improvisational adventure or an inebriational travelogue.

I express myself in sculpture since I am not a poet.

If a poet would work politically, he must give himself up to a party; and so soon as he does that, he is lost as a poet.

If a poet interprets a poem of his own he limits its suggestibility.

If artists and poets are unhappy, it is after all because happiness does not interest them.

I fell in love with social work, and that was my undoing as a poet.

If he had had no education, maybe Basho could have been a much greater poet.

If sexual intercourse, as the poets tell us, began in 1963, it was another decade and a half before the American political system began to take notice.

I'd like to imagine that "dreamoir" becomes a subgenre of nonfiction, maybe ultimately because I'd love to read many more dreamoirs by other writers - poets and memoirists especially.

If I correctly understand the sense of this succinct observation, our poet suggests here that human life is but a series of footnotes to a vast obscure unfinished masterpiece.

I find my data first in myself, not first in the poets. For if I did not find it in myself, I would not be able to find it in the poets.

I first got involved in theater in 1968, at the height of a social tumult. I was a poet.

If you believe you're a poet, then you're saved.

If you're a poet and you're using rhyme, rhyme generates ideas. If you're a songwriter and you're using melody and words together, they bounce off each other in interesting ways that you couldn't get otherwise, because you do things unexpectedly.

If you criticize a fine genius, the odds are that you are out of your reckoning, and, instead of the poet, are censuring your owncaricature of him.

I had the title poet, and maybe I was one for a while. Also, the title singer was kindly accorded me, even though I could barely carry a tune.

I have never considered myself a poet. I have no interest in poetic artistry.

If you rank me with the lyric poets, my exalted head shall strike the stars. [Lat., Quod si me lyricis vatibus inseris, Sublimi feriam sidera vertice.]

I have never considered myself a poet. Therefore, I am not a rival of anyone, and I do not consider anybody my rival.

If the poet spun for half an hour daily, his poetry would gain in richness.

I hear poetry whenever I turn on the radio. Eminem is a better poet than just about everybody. He's better than Billy Collins; he's better than Richard Wilbur; he's better than me.

I knew that poets seemed to be miserable.

I know as well as thee that I am no poet born It is a trade, I never learnt nor indeed could learn If I make verses-'tis in spite Of nature and my stars I write.