Poems Quotes

I was very committed to the process of composing, working at poems, putting things together and taking them apart like some kind of experimental filmmaker.

The best books of our times have included the three mature volumes of Philip Larkin. They're very short books of poems, and very carefully arranged.

I would like to be proud of having written some poems that will be remembered, but I will never know whether I will have any reason to be proud of that.

I consider my films to be poems that are all as personal as my writing and as hand-made.

I like Beethoven, especially the poems.

I also write poems, so that is something that I really enjoy.

I like poems that are little games.

I write the poems first, with only a few exceptions for odd reasons, where I'm given the illustration first.

All I wanted to do was write - at the time, poems, and prose, too. I guess my ambition was simply to make money however I could to keep myself going in some modest way, and I didn't need much, I was unmarried at the time, no children.

Well it is certainly the case that the poems - which were in fact published during Shakespeare's lifetime - are weird if they began or originated in this form, as I think they did, because the poems get out of control.

I admire Ginsberg as a poet, despite the fact that he seems not to know when he is being good and when he is bad. But he will last, or at least those poems will last.

The reason one writes poems is so that your poem will be remembered.

I like poems you can tack all over with a hammer and there are no hollow places.

Of the individual poems, some are more lyric and some are more descriptive or narrative. Each poem is fixed in a moment. All those moments written or read together take on the movement and architecture of a narrative.

I want to write poems which are very emotional, but I would have some hesitation in saying I want to write poems which are sentimental.

Early on, if I was alone two three nights in a row, I'd start writing poems about suicide.

Poems in a way are spells against death. They are milestones, to see where you were then from where you are now. To perpetuate your feelings, to establish them. If you have in any way touched the central heart of mankind's feelings, you'll survive.

I don't write poems and put them to music. Just let things flow.

My earlier poems were sadder than my poems are today, perhaps because I wrote them in confusion or when I was unhappy. But I am not a melancholy person, quite the contrary, no one enjoys laughing more than I do.

When I first started to write, I was aware of being queer, but I didn't write about it. Queer poems would probably not have been accepted by the editors I sent them to.

If I wasn't writing poems I'd be washing my hands all the time.

It all has to do with art - writing, painting, things I've done for a long time but just never had enough time to pursue. I have poetry - things that are designed for songs, but they're always poems first.

Well, "The Wellspring" was written from 1983 to 1986. And it had a section in the beginning that was poems that began from others' experience.

I had always written. I had written stories and poems. Then I started writing plays.

The few bad poems which occasionally are created during abstinence are of no great interest.

There must of course be a relationship between translating and making poems of your own, but what it is I just don't know.

I wrote poems in my corner of the Brooks Street station. I sent them to two editors who rejected them right off. I read those letters of rejection years later and I agreed with those editors.

We all write poems; it is simply that poets are the ones who write in words.

Well, it's a badge of honour for any self-respecting poet to be criticized by Auberon Waugh. But in a lot of ways my poems are very conventional, and it's no big deal for me to write a poem in either free verse or strict form; modern poets can, and do, do both.

The number of people writing poems is vast, and their reasons for doing so are many, that much can be surmised from the stacks of submissions.