Poets are born, not paid.
~By Addison Mizner ~
Women make us poets, children make us philosophers.
~By Malcolm De Chazal ~
There are very few great poets in the world.
~By Tahar Ben Jelloun ~
The American public does not know poets exist.
~By James Broughton ~
Let the poets cry themselves to sleep, and all their tearful words will turn back into steam.
~By Conor Oberst ~
A Shakespeare could have arisen only on English soil. In the same way, your great dramatists and poets express the nature and essence of the Norwegian people, but they also express that which is universally valid for all mankind.
~By Gustav Stresemann ~
I wonder what it means about American literary culture and its transmission when I consider the number of American poets who earn their living teaching creative writing in universities. I've ended up doing that myself.
~By Marilyn Hacker ~
Children can write poetry and then, unless they're poets, they stop when reach puberty.
~By Dennis Potter ~
I decided that it was not wisdom that enabled poets to write their poetry, but a kind of instinct or inspiration, such as you find in seers and prophets who deliver all their sublime messages without knowing in the least what they mean.
~By Socrates ~
She knows more of love than the poets can say, and her eyes offer something that won't go away.
~By Harry Chapin ~
I'm inspired by the poets, so I'm always going to give in that direction, rather than in any other. It's the making of me... and also the downfall of me.
~By Roy Harper ~
Poets utter great and wise things which they do not themselves understand.
~By Plato ~
It is quite true, as some poets said, that the God who created man must have had a sinister sense of humor, creating him a reasonable being, yet forcing him to take this ridiculous posture, and driving him with blind craving for this ridiculous performance.
~By David Herbert Lawrence ~
Poets have said that the reason to have children is to give yourself immortality. Immortality? Now that I have five children, my only hope is that they are all out of the house before I die.
~By Bill Cosby ~
And if we must educate our poets and artists in science, we must educate our masters, labour and capital, in art.
~By John B. S. Haldane ~
In the world of poetry there are would-be poets, workshop poets, promising poets, lovesick poets, university poets, and a few real poets.
~By James Broughton ~
Poets are soldiers that liberate words from the steadfast possession of definition.
~By Eli Khamarov ~
Poets, we know, are terribly sensitive people, and in my observation one of the things they are most sensitive about is money.
~By Robert Penn Warren ~
In The Doors we have both musicians and poets, and both know of each other's art, so we can effect a synthesis.
~By Robby Krieger ~
Written poetry is worth reading once, and then should be destroyed. Let the dead poets make way for others.
~By Antonin Artaud ~
Without poets, without artists, men would soon weary of nature's monotony.
~By Guillaume Apollinaire ~
The Helicon of too many poets is not a hill crowned with sunshine and visited by the Muses and the Graces, but an old, mouldering house, full of gloom and haunted by ghosts.
~By Henry Wadsworth Longfellow ~
Poets are the only people to whom love is not only a crucial, but an indispensable experience, which entitles them to mistake it for a universal one.
~By Hannah Arendt ~
Living at that pitch, on that edge, is something which many poets engage in to some extent.
~By Paul Muldoon ~
Of course poets have morals and manners of their own, and custom is no argument with them.
~By Thomas Hardy ~
Poets, like whores, are only hated by each other.
~By William Wycherley ~
Pound's crazy. All poets are. They have to be. You don't put a poet like Pound in the loony bin.
~By Ernest Hemingway ~
A lot of young poets today, from what I've heard and experienced, can't get their heads past George W. Bush, and I've heard so many poems about this democracy and this era of politics that I'm kind of bored by it.
~By Amber Tamblyn ~
I am what libraries and librarians have made me, with little assistance from a professor of Greek and poets.
~By Heraclitus ~
My favorite poets may not be your bread and butter. I have more favorite poems than favorite poets.
~By Rita Dove ~
All that a critic, as critic, can give poets is the deadly encouragement that never ceases to remind them of how heavy their inheritance is.
~By Harold Bloom ~
There are some fine books and essays about that. Lewis Hyde has written about alcoholism and poets and the role that society gives its writers - encouraging them to die.
~By Sharon Olds ~
Science is not addressed to poets.
~By George Henry Lewes ~
I hate the whole race. There is no believing a word they say, your professional poets, I mean there never existed a more worthless set than Byron and his friends for example.
~By Arthur Wellesley ~
Reviewers are usually people who would have been, poets, historians, biographer, if they could. They have tried their talents at one thing or another and have failed; therefore they turn critic.
~By Samuel Taylor Coleridge ~
All kids, when they go to school, are pretty good artists and dancers and singers and poets. All that gets buried, basically through being educated, or brainwashed.
~By William Wiley ~
Language ought to be the joint creation of poets and manual workers.
~By George Orwell ~
Homer has taught all other poets the art of telling lies skillfully.
~By Aristotle ~
Poets don't draw. They unravel their handwriting and then tie it up again, but differently.
~By Jean Cocteau ~
I always liked the magic of poetry but now I'm just starting to see behind the curtain of even the best poets, how they've used, tried and tested craft to create the illusion. Wonderful feeling of exhilaration to finally be there.
~By David Knopfler ~
The poets whom I knew then were all men and all seemed dauntingly sure of themselves - although I am sure that really they were as uncertain as I was.
~By Helen Dunmore ~
All poets' wives have rotten lives Their husbands look at them like knives.
~By Delmore Schwartz ~
But the West did not last long enough. Its folk myths and heroes became stage properties of Hollywood before the poets had begun to get to work on them.
~By Christopher Dawson ~
Money is everywhere but so is poetry. What we lack are the poets.
~By Federico Fellini ~
My sisters were going out with artists and poets, and eventually it was the creative world which attracted me.
~By Luc Ferrari ~
Lyrics have to be underwritten. That's why poets generally make poor lyric writers because the language is too rich. You get drowned in it.
~By Stephen Sondheim ~
Perhaps the old monks were right when they tried to root love out; perhaps the poets are right when they try to water it. It is a blood-red flower, with the color of sin; but there is always the scent of a god about it.
~By Olive Schreiner ~
Poetry is the work of poets, not of peoples or communities; artistic creation can never be anything but the production of an individual mind.
~By Lascelles Abercrombie ~
I can't look at things in the simple, large way that great poets do.
~By Isaac Rosenberg ~
The poets are only the interpreters of the Gods.
~By Socrates ~
The south produced statesmen and soldiers, planters and doctors and lawyers and poets, but certainly no engineers and mechanics. Let Yankees adopt such low callings.
~By Margaret Mitchell ~
Young poets bewail the passing of love; old poets, the passing of time. There is surprisingly little difference.
~By Mason Cooley ~
I think one of the things that language poets are very involved with is getting away from conventional ideas of beauty, because those ideas contain a certain attitude toward women, certain attitudes toward sex, certain attitudes toward race, etc.
~By Diane Wakoski ~
Almost all the noblest things that have been achieved in the world, have been achieved by poor men; poor scholars, poor professional men, poor artisans and artists, poor philosophers, poets, and men of genius.
~By Albert Pike ~
Great men are rare, poets are rarer, but the great man who is a poet, transfiguring his greatness, is the rarest of all events.
~By John Drinkwater ~
The poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.
~By Gilbert K. Chesterton ~
If poets were realistic, they wouldn't be poets.
~By Peter Davison ~
As soon as war is declared it will be impossible to hold the poets back. Rhyme is still the most effective drum.
~By Jean Giraudoux ~
I'm passing on a tradition of which I am part. There's a long line of poets who went before me, and I'm another one, and I'm hoping to pass that on to other younger, or newer, poets than myself.
~By Diane Wakoski ~
But poets were not considered dangerous and they were advised to exercise self-censorship. At most, poets were requested not to write at all. I took advantage of this negative liberty.
~By Eugenio Montale ~
The scholars and poets of an earlier time can be read only with a dictionary to help.
~By Carl Sandburg ~
Poets can't resist the dramatic pull of their lives and so inevitably write autobiographical verse.
~By John Barton ~
Southern poets are still writing narrative poems, poems in forms, dramatic poems.
~By Robert Morgan ~
Artist - musicians, painters, writers, poets, always seem to have had the most accurate perception of what is really going on around them, not the official version or the popular perception of contemporary life.
~By Billy Joel ~
Nations are born in the hearts of poets, they prosper and die in the hands of politicians.
~By Muhammad Iqbal ~
Poets should ignore most criticism and get on with making poetry.
~By Anne Stevenson ~
Poets and heroes are of the same race, the latter do what the former conceive.
~By Alphonse de Lamartine ~
I have learned so much from working with other poets, travelling and reading with them, spending days discussing poems in progress. There is the sense that we are all, as writers, part of something which is more powerful than any of us.
~By Helen Dunmore ~
In Russia all tyrants believe poets to be their worst enemies.
~By Yevgeny Yevtushenko ~
The poets' scrolls will outlive the monuments of stone. Genius survives; all else is claimed by death.
~By Edmund Spenser ~
Modesty, tis a virtue not often found among poets, for almost every one of them thinks himself the greatest in the world.
~By Miguel De Cervantes ~
Poets wish to profit or to please.
~By Horace ~
Maybe there are three or four really good poets in a generation.
~By Kenneth Koch ~
The poets, therefore, however much they adorned the gods in their poems, and amplified their exploits with the highest praises, yet very frequently confess that all things are held together and governed by one spirit or mind.
~By Lactantius ~
Poets, in their way, are practical men; they are interested in results.
~By Allen Tate ~
The most important thing for poets to do is to write as little as possible.
~By T. S. Eliot ~
I don't know if younger poets read a lot of, you know, the poets - the established poets. There was a lot of pretty boring stuff to sort of put up with and to add to, to make something vital from.
~By Robert Adamson ~
Obviously one of the things that poets from Northern Ireland and beyond - had to try to make sense of was what was happening on a day-to-day political level.
~By Paul Muldoon ~
There have always been poets who performed. Blake sang his Songs of Innocence and Experience to parties of friends.
~By Adrian Mitchell ~
Concrete poets continue to turn out beautiful things, but to me they're more visual than oral, and they almost really belong on the wall rather than in a book. I haven't the least idea of where poetry is going.
~By James Laughlin ~
People wish to be poets more than they wish to write poetry, and that's a mistake. One should wish to celebrate more than one wishes to be celebrated.
~By Lucille Clifton ~
American poets celebrate their bodies, very specifically, as Whitman did.
~By Diane Wakoski ~
Poets deal in writing about feelings and trying to find the language and images for intense feelings.
~By Carol Ann Duffy ~
I think Ginsberg has done more harm to the craft that I honor and live by than anybody else by reducing it to a kind of mean that enables the most dubious practitioners to claim they are poets because they think, If the kind of thing Ginsberg does is poetry, I can do that.
~By James Dickey ~
Whilst in Prussia poets only speak of the love of country as one of the dearest of all human affections, here there is no man who does not feel, and describe with rapture, how much he loves his country.
~By Karl Philipp Moritz ~
In its famous paradox, the equation of money and excrement, psychoanalysis becomes the first science to state what common sense and the poets have long known - that the essence of money is in its absolute worthlessness.
~By Norman O. Brown ~
The poet's other readers are the ancient poets, who look upon the freshly written pages from an incorruptible distance. Their poetic forms are permanent, and it is difficult to create new forms which can approach them.
~By Salvatore Quasimodo ~
Travellers, like poets, are mostly an angry race: by falling into a daily fit of passion, I proved to the governor and his son, who were profuse in their attentions, that I was in earnest.
~By Richard Francis Burton ~
I was at a benefit for some imprisoned students in the '60s at San Francisco State, and there were lots of poets reading for the benefit: one was Elizabeth Bishop.
~By Thom Gunn ~
A lot of poets too live on the margins of social acceptance, they certainly aren't in it for the money. William Blake - only his first book was legitimately published.
~By Jim Jarmusch ~
Well, we all start thinking we're going to be Romantic rock stars, but then reality hits and you realize no one reads you but other poets.
~By George Murray ~
It's difficult to get films made, especially films about poets.
~By Dougray Scott ~
Till now poets were privileged to insert a certain proportion of nonsense - very far in excess of one-half of one per cent - into their otherwise sober documents.
~By John C. Ransom ~
Poets are always ahead of things in a certain way, their sense of language and their vision.
~By Jim Jarmusch ~
Saints have no moderation, nor do poets, just exuberance.
~By Anne Sexton ~
I don't think it's by accident that I was first attracted to translating two French women poets.
~By Marilyn Hacker ~
I took to wearing a black tie known as the Ascot, with long drooping ends. I had seen pictures of painters, sculptors, poets, wearing this style of tie.
~By Carl Sandburg ~
The trouble with the performance poets is that they don't seem to have read anything. So there is not a real sense of the poetic tradition in their work.
~By Peter Davison ~
To have great poets, there must be great audiences.
~By Walt Whitman ~
Poets lose half the praise they should have got, Could it be known what they discreetly blot.
~By Edmund Waller ~
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