Poetry Quotes

You watch an old 'Jeopardy!' and the categories alone are very plain. 'Poetry,' or 'Movies,' or 'Physics.' If you watch it now, though, there'll be a theme board where the categories are all Hitchcock movies. Lots more jokes, lots more high-concept categories and questions.

In Australia, not reading poetry is the national pastime.

Poetry is as precise a thing as geometry.

I wrote things for the school's newspaper, and - like all teenagers - I dabbled in poetry.

Poetry is all nouns and verbs.

The poet may be used as a barometer, but let us not forget that he is also part of the weather.

In poetry, you must love the words, the ideas and the images and rhythms with all your capacity to love anything at all.

Poetry is the utterance of deep and heart-felt truth - the true poet is very near the oracle.

A poet's autobiography is his poetry. Anything else is just a footnote.

Publishing the lyric books, poetry or comics of other musicians I know. That's the thing I really want to break into!

Real friendship, like real poetry, is extremely rare - and precious as a pearl.

Deep feeling doesn't make for good poetry. A way with language would be a bit of help.

All the modern verse plays, they're terrible; they're mostly about the poetry. It's more important that the play is first.

Poetry surrounds us everywhere, but putting it on paper is, alas, not so easy as looking at it.

I see people who talk about America, and then undermine it by not paying attention to its soul, to its poetry. I see polarization, reductionism and superficiality.

I think that is where poetry reading becomes such an individual thing. I mean I have friend who like poets who just don't say anything to me at all, I mean they seem to me rather ordinary and pedestrian.

The true spirit of delight, the exaltation, the sense of being more than Man, which is the touchstone of the highest excellence, is to be found in mathematics as surely as poetry.

Poetry is emotion put into measure. The emotion must come by nature, but the measure can be acquired by art.

I want to promote poetry to the point where you got all the baldhead kids running around doing poetry, getting the music out of the way and having only words, the spoken word, and then see what happens.

You don't help people in your poems. I've been trying to help people all my life - that's my trouble.

Some Marines made fun of the fact that I had done plays and studied poetry, but then I won the award for physical training.

The fact that something is in a rhymed form or in blank verse will not make it good poetry.

I've always written. When I was in school, the only teacher who ever liked me was my creative writing teacher. I used to enter poetry competitions, and I don't think I ever lost one. So I had the idea for a while of being some kind of poet.

Poetry is one of the few nasty childhood habits I've managed to grow out of.

When you're going through something, whether it's a wonderful thing like having a child or a sad thing like losing somebody, you often feel like 'Oh my God, I'm so overwhelmed; I'm dealing with this huge thing on my own.' In fact, poetry's a nice reminder that, no, everybody goes through it. These are universal experiences.

I don't think it's always good to read lots of poetry.

Poetry is one of the destinies of speech... One would say that the poetic image, in its newness, opens a future to language.

Music begins to atrophy when it departs too far from the dance... poetry begins to atrophy when it gets too far from music.

All those authors there, most of whom of course I've never met. That's the poetry side, that's the prose side, that's the fishing and miscellaneous behind me. You get an affection for books that you've enjoyed.

Deals are my art form. Other people paint beautifully on canvas or write wonderful poetry. I like making deals, preferably big deals. That's how I get my kicks.