Verse Quotes

I am not at all clear what free verse is anymore. That's one of the things you learn not to know.

The record Clef and I did was just sitting there. So I said, Clef, I got a record, hit a verse on it. He just went in, messed around and ended up doing the hook too.

Most of those who make collections of verse or epigram are like men eating cherries or oysters: they choose out the best at first, and end by eating all.

A great actor is independent of the poet, because the supreme essence of feeling does not reside in prose or in verse, but in the accent with which it is delivered.

I just start playing music and eventually I sing something, a line of a verse or a B section or a line of a chorus, and the line that I end up singing is related to the music I'm playing, if that makes any sense. And I go from there.

Sometimes I'll have sections that I'm not quite sure how they fit in the puzzle of a tune, they'll get moved around; what I think was originally a verse ends up becoming the chorus, or what's an intro gets dropped as a hook, things get shifted around a lot.

Verse comedy is interesting to me because of the challenge of writing in rhymed couplets, which is not a form that's usually amenable to English, yet to me it gives great possibility for comedy.

I can work on a verse for a very long time before realising it's not any good and then, and only then, can I discard it.

Everything that Traffic ever did, I'd give Steve a complete lyric, titled, written out with the verse, the bridge, the shape and rhyme and then Steve had to figure out how the meter of the words would fit musically.

If Galileo had said in verse that the world moved, the inquisition might have let him alone.

We learned a verse of this and that and we were having fun with the songs. Tommy would make up stories to go along with them and I would yell at him, 'Hey, stupid, that's not right,' and he was like a silly kid trying to impress.

Poets can't resist the dramatic pull of their lives and so inevitably write autobiographical verse.

So it is in poetry. All we ask is that the mood recorded shall impress us as having been of the kind that exhausts the imaginative capacity; if it fails to do this the failure will announce itself either in prose or in insignificant verse.

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

The rudiment of verse may, possibly, be found in the spondee.

Some things remain fragments, just the lyrics and melodies or a line or two or a verse.

If a poem is not memorable, there's probably something wrong. One of the problems of free verse is that much of the free verse poetry is not memorable.

What I do say is that I can write verse, and that the writing of verse in strict form is the best possible training for writing good prose.

But for a few phrases from his letters and an odd line or two of his verse, the poet walks gagged through his own biography.

I read and walked for miles at night along the beach, writing bad blank verse and searching endlessly for someone wonderful who would step out of the darkness and change my life. It never crossed my mind that that person could be me.

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.

No verse can give pleasure for long, nor last, that is written by drinkers of water.

You even called me stupid in your verse, and I'm almost agreeing, for where stupidity is involved, you are quite an expert, friend.

Their free verse was no form at all, yet it made history.

France is not poetic; she even feels, in fact, a congenital horror of poetry. Among the writers who use verse, those whom she will always prefer are the most prosaic.

The basic line in any good verse is cadenced... building it around the natural breath structures of speech.

Mostly the thought and the verse come inseparably. In my poem Poetics, it's as close as I come to telling how I do it.

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

Do it again on the next verse, and people think you meant it.

Sometimes I'll sing the same verse through the entire song, because the other verses aren't clicking. And when they do come to me, I'm in the middle of that same verse!