All 78,476 Quotes


My mother carried on and supported us her ambition had been to write poetry and songs.
Philip Levine on poetry

My art and poetry is very political now. Because you've got to find that truth within you and express yourself. Somewhere out there, I know, there will be people who will listen.
Jack Bowman on poetry

In my opinion, the most significant works of the twentieth century are those that rise beyond the conceptual tyranny of genre they are, at the same time, poetry, criticism, narrative, drama, etc.
Juan Goytisolo on poetry

For whatever reason, people, including very well-educated people or people otherwise interested in reading, do not read poetry.
Paul Muldoon on poetry

That's one of the great things about poetry one realises that one does one's little turn - that you're just part of the great crop, as it were.
Paul Muldoon on poetry

The other side of it is that, despite all that, people reach out to poetry at the key moments in their lives.
Paul Muldoon on poetry

We simply have not kept in touch with poetry.
Paul Muldoon on poetry

I don't live for poetry. I live far more than anybody else does.
Charles Olson on poetry

I thought we were gonna open up the world of poetry and music to all kinds of things, and yet, I can't really think of anyone who's done anything like it since.
Ray Manzarek on poetry

I guess I wanted to leave America for awhile. It wasn't that I wanted to become an expatriate, or just never come back, I needed some breathing room. I'd already been translating French poetry, I'd been to Paris once before and liked it very much, and so I just went.
Paul Auster on poetry

I was always interested in French poetry sort of as a sideline to my own work, I was translating contemporary French poets. That kind of spilled out into translation as a way to earn money, pay for food and put bread on the table.
Paul Auster on poetry

There is the view that poetry should improve your life. I think people confuse it with the Salvation Army.
John Ashbery on poetry

In politics, as in poetry, it is sometimes true that it is darkest before dawn.
Lawrence Summers on poetry

I have been enlightened. I have fallen into poetry and it has swallowed me up.
Keith Haring on poetry

Music is my thing. It's my thing it's what I love. It's what I do. It's football to me it's Christmas to me religion to me poetry to me.
Ryan Adams on poetry

The whole thing about making films in an organic film on location is that it's not all about characters, relationships and themes, it's also about place and the poetry of place. It's about the spirit of what you find, the accidents of what you stumble across.
Mike Leigh on poetry

On a summer night it can be lovely to sit around outside with friends after dinner and, yes, read poetry to each other. Keats and Yeats will never let you down, but it's differently exciting to read the work of poets who are still walking around out there.
Michael Cunningham on poetry

Theater is far superior to film in poetry, in abstract poetry.
Julie Taymor on poetry

I was in Paris at an English-language bookstore. I picked up a volume of Dickinson's poetry. I came back to my hotel, read 2,000 of her poems and immediately began composing in my head. I wrote down the melodies even before I got to a piano.
Gordon Getty on poetry

Because people are very interested in my poetry, in what I say.
Compay Segundo on poetry