Best 1314 quotes in «poet quotes» category

How does the artist function as poet-slash-witness-slash-trickster?

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

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

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

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

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

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.

How poetry comes to the poet is a mystery.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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 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.

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

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

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.

I carry my unwritten poems in cipher on my face!

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

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

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

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

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 express myself in sculpture since I am not a poet.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.]

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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 yet known a poet who did not think himself super-excellent.

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

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.