Writing Poetry Quotes

• Remember, writing poetry is like making love: one will never know whether one's own pleasure is shared.

  Cesare Pavese

  Writing, Poetry, Making Love

  Cesare Pavese, Alma Elizabeth Murch (1961). “This Business of Living”, p.51, Transaction Publishers

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• Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words.

  Robert Frost

  Poetry, Emotion, Found

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• Composing computer programs to solve scientific problems is like writing poetry. You must choose every word with care and link it with the other words in perfect syntax. There is no place for verbosity or carelessness. To become fluent in a computer lnaguage demands almost the antithesis of modern loose thinking. It requires many interactive sessions, the hands-on use of the device. You do not learn a foreign language from a book, rather you have to live in the country for year to let the langauge become an automatic part of you, and the same is true for computer languages.

  James Lovelock

  Country, Book, Writing

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• Writing poetry makes you intensely conscious of how words sound, both aloud and inside the head of the reader. You learn the weight of words and how they sound to the ear.

  Helen Dunmore

  Writing, Sound, Ears

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• The best craftsmanship always leaves holes and gaps... so that something that is not in the poem can creep, crawl, flash or thunder in.

  Dylan Thomas

  Poetry, Gaps, Thunder

  Dylan Thomas, Daniel Jones (2003). “The Poems of Dylan Thomas”, p.22, New Directions Publishing

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• Life makes writing poetry necessary to prove I really was paying attention.

  Mark Strand

  Writing, Attention, Prove

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• There's no money in poetry, but then there's no poetry in money, either.

  Robert Graves

  Money, Writing, Poetry

  Robert Graves, Frank L. Kersnowski (1989). “Conversations with Robert Graves”, p.71, Univ. Press of Mississippi

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• There is something about writing poetry that brings a man close to the cliff's edge.

  Charles Bukowski

  Writing, Men, Cliffs

  Charles Bukowski (2013). “Notes of a Dirty Old Man”, p.71, City Lights Books

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• Writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down.

  Robert Frost

  Writing, Poetry, Tennis

  Address to Milton Academy, Milton, Mass., 17 May 1935

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• Writing poetry is the hard manual labor of the imagination.

  Ishmael Reed

  Writing, Imagination, Poetry

  Ishmael Reed (1995). “Airing Dirty Laundry”, Perseus Books

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• Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.

  T. S. Eliot

  Art, Writing, Reading Poetry

  The Sacred Wood "Philip Massinger" (1920)

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• 

  Two roads diverged in a wood and I - I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.

  Robert Frost

  Inspirational, Motivational, Happiness

  "The Road Not Taken" l. 16 (1916)

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• Great poetry is always written by somebody straining to go beyond what he can do.

  Stephen Spender

  Poetry, Great Poet, Can Do

  The New York Times, March 26, 1961.

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• The writing of a poem is like a child throwing stones into a mineshaft. You compose first, then you listen for the reverberation.

  James Fenton

  Children, Writing, Poetry

  The Independent on Sunday, June 24, 1990.

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• He who draws noble delights from sentiments of poetry is a true poet, though he has never written a line in all his life.

  George Sand

  Poetry, Noble, Delight

  George Sand (1800). “The Haunted Pool: (La Mare Au Diable).”, p.20

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• Writing is a bit like walking into a big bookstore. It's the bookstore of your brain, and you know you're never going to read all those books. It makes you happy you're in the bookstore, and you're nervous because you know you're never going to read all those books. So the nervousness is also happy. Once I get going writing poetry is one of the happiest things I do, but it is also fraught with all of these anxieties.

  Mary Jo Salter

  Book, Writing, Anxiety

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• To think of writing poetry as a "career" is not only ridiculous, it's dangerous. To the imagination. To the way one thinks of art. The reason poetry as a genre is so special is because it cannot be made a commodity.

  Cate Marvin

  Art, Writing, Thinking

  Source: www.redividerjournal.org

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• It doesn't matter if people are playing jazz or writing poetry. If they want to be successful, they need to learn how to persist and persevere and keep on working until the work is done... I bet there isn't a single highly successful person who has not depended on grit. Nobody is talented enough to not have to work hard, and that's what grit allows you to do.

  Jonah Lehrer

  Success, Hard Work, Writing

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• We're running into a lot of new problems today because of what we emphasize in this culture. The word 'success' to the average person means earning a lot of money and having a home, two cars, children in college. Success to me is entirely different to what success is to the average person.  Success is being a successful human being in terms of pursuing what you believe in. If you believe in making paintings, writing poetry, writing music. If this is what you really want, you're successful to yourself. But to be successful to your culture means to sell yourself short of what you really want

  Jacque Fresco

  Success, Music, Running

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• Suffering has as much right to be expressed as a martyr has to cry out. So it may have been false to say that writing poetry after Auschwitz is impossible.

  Theodor Adorno

  Art, Writing, Suffering

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• I like the way words go together and I like the gamesmanship of writing poetry. It is such a challenge.

  Jeffery Deaver

  Writing, Challenges, Together

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• The whole point of writing poetry or fiction is that you get to agonize over whatever it is you want to say, and you finally say it, and you get it as perfect as you can make it. Then you're forced to babble freestyle.

  Nick Laird

  Writing, Perfect

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• When Rimbaud became a slave trader, he stopped writing poetry.

  Chinua Achebe

  Writing, Slave, Traders

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• I always thought that writing poetry was in itself a political act.

  John Ashbery

  Writing, Political

  Source: www.raintaxi.com

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• I've been transformed by stories, and I think that storytelling is definitely sacred. I take it very seriously because my life has been changed, whether it was a movie, a play, a piece of writing, poetry, a painting.

  Karla Souza

  Writing, Thinking, Play

  Source: www.sheknows.com

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