All Quotes

A plumber is an adventurer who traces leaky pipes to their source.
‐‐ Arthur Baer

A plump, well-fed stream is as satisfying to behold as a well-fed animal or a thrifty tree. One source of charm in the English landscape is the full, placid stream the season through; no desiccated watercourses will you see there, nor any feeble, decrepit brooks, hardly able to get over the ground.
‐‐ John Burroughs

A pocket square must always - always - be white and a bit wild. If it is too prepared, it is tacky.
‐‐ Lapo Elkann

A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness.
‐‐ Robert Frost

A poem begins in delight and ends in wisdom.
‐‐ Robert Frost

A poem can have an impact, but you can't expect an audience to understand all the nuances.
‐‐ Douglas Dunn

A poem generated by its own laws may be unrealized and bad in terms of so-called objective principles of taste, judgement, deduction.
‐‐ A. R. Ammons

A poem I write is not just about me; it is about national identity, not just regional but national, the history of people in relation to other people. I reach for these outward stories to make sense of my own life, and how my story intersects with a larger public history.
‐‐ Natasha Trethewey

A poem in form still has to have voice, gesture, a sense of discovery, a metaphoric connection, as any poetry does.
‐‐ Robert Morgan

A poem is a naked person... Some people say that I am a poet.
‐‐ Bob Dylan

A poem is bound by language, but a poetics is not.
‐‐ Joshua Cohen

A poem is learned by heart and then not again repeated. We will suppose that after a half year it has been forgotten: no effort of recollection is able to call it back again into consciousness.
‐‐ Hermann Ebbinghaus

A poem is never finished, only abandoned.
‐‐ Paul Valery

A poem is true if it hangs together. Information points to something else. A poem points to nothing but itself.
‐‐ E. M. Forster

A poem may be an instance of morality, of social conditions, of psychological history; it may instance all its qualities, but never one of them alone, nor any two or three; never less than all.
‐‐ Allen Tate

A poem might be defined as thinking about feelings - about human feelings and frailties.
‐‐ Anne Stevenson

A poem records emotions and moods that lie beyond normal language, that can only be patched together and hinted at metaphorically.
‐‐ Diane Ackerman

A poem with grandly conceived and executed stanzas, such as one of Keats's odes, should be like an enfilade of rooms in a palace: one proceeds, with eager anticipation, from room to room.
‐‐ James Fenton

A poet can feel free, in my estimation, to write a poem for himself. Or a painter can paint a painting for himself. You can write a short story for yourself. But for me, comedy by its nature is communal. If other people don't get it, I'm not sure why you are doing it.
‐‐ Keegan-Michael Key

A poet can survive everything but a misprint.
‐‐ Oscar Wilde

A poet clings to his own tradition and avoids internationalism.
‐‐ Salvatore Quasimodo

A poet could write volumes about diners, because they're so beautiful. They're brightly lit, with chrome and booths and Naugahyde and great waitresses. Now, it might not be so great in the health department, but I think diner food is really worth experiencing periodically.
‐‐ David Lynch

A poet in history is divine, but a poet in the next room is a joke.
‐‐ Max Eastman

A poet is a man who manages, in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms, to be struck by lightning five or six times.
‐‐ Randall Jarrell

A poet is a man who puts up a ladder to a star and climbs it while playing a violin.
‐‐ Edmond de Goncourt

A poet is a nightingale, who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds.
‐‐ Percy Bysshe Shelley

A poet is never one of the people. He is detached, remote, and the life of small-time dances and talk about football would not be for him. He might take part but could not belong.
‐‐ Patrick Kavanagh

A poet is someone who stands outside in the rain hoping to be struck by lightning.
‐‐ James Dickey

A poet must be a psychologist, but a secret one: he should know and feel the roots of phenomena but present only the phenomena themselves in full bloom or as they fade away.
‐‐ Ivan Turgenev

A poet must leave traces of his passage, not proof.
‐‐ Rene Char

A poet never takes notes. You never take notes in a love affair.
‐‐ Robert Frost

A poet or prose narrator usually looks back on what he has achieved against a backdrop of the years that have passed, generally finding that some of these achievements are acceptable, while others are less so.
‐‐ Eyvind Johnson

A poet ought not to pick nature's pocket. Let him borrow, and so borrow as to repay by the very act of borrowing. Examine nature accurately, but write from recollection, and trust more to the imagination than the memory.
‐‐ Samuel Taylor Coleridge

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

A poet's cultural baggage and erudition can interfere with a poem.
‐‐ Douglas Dunn

A poet's work is to name the unnamable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it going to sleep.
‐‐ Salman Rushdie

A poet's work is to name the unnameable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it going to sleep.
‐‐ Salman Rushdie

A poet should always be 'collaborating' with his public, but this public, in the mass, cannot make itself heard, and he has to guess at its requirements and its criticisms.
‐‐ Louis MacNeice

A poet who is a bad man is a degraded being, baser and more culpable than a bad man who is not a poet.
‐‐ Victor Hugo

A poetic, sensitive, tortured soul, the Ian Curtis of the myth - he was definitely that.
‐‐ Peter Hook

A point of view can be a dangerous luxury when substituted for insight and understanding.
‐‐ Marshall McLuhan

A police force, wherever they are, is made up of amazing people, and I respect them a great deal.
‐‐ Nancy McKeon

A policeman, as you discover, has to put up with a hell of a lot of abuse. A man in any other line of work would nail a guy who laid that kind of abuse on him. I know I would.
‐‐ Kent McCord

A policy is a temporary creed liable to be changed, but while it holds good it has got to be pursued with apostolic zeal.
‐‐ Mahatma Gandhi

A polite enemy is just as difficult to discredit, as a rude friend is to protect.
‐‐ Bryant H. McGill

A political convention is not a place where you can come away with any trace of faith in human nature.
‐‐ Murray Kempton

A political event was that I met Fidel Castro, the Cuban revolutionary. He is a young, intelligent guy, very sure of himself and extraordinarily audacious; I think we hit it off well.
‐‐ Che Guevara

A political leader must keep looking over his shoulder all the time to see if the boys are still there. If they aren't still there, he's no longer a political leader.
‐‐ Bernard Baruch

A political party is dying before our eyes-and I don't mean the Democrats. I'm talking about the mainstream media, which is being destroyed by the opposition.
‐‐ Howard Fineman