All Quotes

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

The poet Melvin B. Tolson once said, 'A civilization is judged only in its decline.' That made sense to me. I would imagine the same is true for poets and tennis players.
‐‐ Nikki Giovanni

The poet must decide not to impose his feelings in order to write without sentimentality.
‐‐ John Barton

The poet never asks for admiration; he wants to be believed.
‐‐ Jean Cocteau

The poet nothing affirmeth and therefore never lieth.
‐‐ Philip Sidney

The poet produces the beautiful by fixing his attention on something real.
‐‐ Simone Veil

The poet ranks far below the painter in the representation of visible things, and far below the musician in that of invisible things.
‐‐ Leonardo da Vinci

The poet's expression of joy conceals his despair at not having found the reality of joy.
‐‐ Max Jacob

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.
‐‐ Salvatore Quasimodo

The poet's perfect expression is the token of a perfect experience; what he says in the best possible way he has felt in the best possible way, that is, completely.
‐‐ John Drinkwater

The poet's spoken discourse often depends on a mystique, on the spiritual freedom that finds itself enslaved on earth.
‐‐ Salvatore Quasimodo

The poet sees better than other mortals. I do not see things as they are, but according to my own subjective impression, and this makes life easier and simpler.
‐‐ Robert Schumann

The poet speaks to all men of that other life of theirs that they have smothered and forgotten.
‐‐ Edith Sitwell

The poetic act consists of suddenly seeing that an idea splits up into a number of equal motifs and of grouping them; they rhyme.
‐‐ Stephane Mallarme

The poetic notion of infinity is far greater than that which is sponsored by any creed.
‐‐ Joseph Brodsky

The poetic prose that most interests me is that of Henri Michaux.
‐‐ Franz Wright

The poetical language of an age should be the current language heightened.
‐‐ Gerard Manley Hopkins

The poetry and transgression that was so much of surrealism's anarchic force has been recruited into mainstream culture. It has been made commonplace by television and magazine merchandising, by computer games and Internet visuals, by film and MTV, by the fashion shoot.
‐‐ Graham Joyce

The poetry community here has been extraordinarily welcoming.
‐‐ George Murray

The poetry from the eighteenth century was prose; the prose from the seventeenth century was poetry.
‐‐ David Hare

The poetry I grew up on is really an intense form of poetry; it's so pure and powerful.
‐‐ K'naan

The poetry of a people comes from the deep recesses of the unconscious, the irrational and the collective body of our ancestral memories.
‐‐ Margaret Walker

The poetry of heroism appeals irresistibly to those who don't go to a war, and even more to those whom the war is making enormously wealthy. It's always so.
‐‐ Louis-Ferdinand Celine

The poetry of the earth is never dead.
‐‐ John Keats

The poetry of this one is called philosophical, of that one philological, of a third rhetorical, and so on. Which is then the poetic poetry?
‐‐ Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

The poetry of Walt Whitman. I can return again and again to these magnificent poems and still get pleasure from reading them.
‐‐ Robert Littell

The poetry that sustains me is when I feel that, for a minute, the clouds have parted and I've seen ecstasy or something.
‐‐ Rita Dove

The poetry you read has been written for you, each of you - black, white, Hispanic, man, woman, gay, straight.
‐‐ Maya Angelou

The poets are only the interpreters of the gods.
‐‐ Socrates

The poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.
‐‐ Gilbert K. Chesterton

The poets' scrolls will outlive the monuments of stone. Genius survives; all else is claimed by death.
‐‐ Edmund Spenser

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.
‐‐ Lactantius

The poets who have written the best poems about war seem to be the poets whose countries have experienced an invasion or vicious dictatorships.
‐‐ Billy Collins

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.
‐‐ Helen Dunmore

The point about a great story is that it's got a beginning, a middle and end.
‐‐ Alan Rickman

The point about hope is that it is something that occurs in very dark moments. It is like a flame in the darkness; it isn't like a confidence and a promise.
‐‐ John Berger

The point about manic depression or bipolar disorder, as it's now more commonly called, is that it's about mood swings. So, you have an elevated mood. When people think of manic depression, they only hear the word depression. They think one's a depressive. The point is, one's a manic-depressive.
‐‐ Stephen Fry

The point about melody and beat and lyric is that they exist to engage you in a very particular way. They want to occupy your attention.
‐‐ Brian Eno

The point about 'state-of-the-nation' novels is not that they should be about the 'state-of-the-nation', but they should be about people.
‐‐ Justin Cartwright

The point always is to be writing something - it leads to more writing.
‐‐ Susanna Moore

The point at which we worked with some of these actors, they weren't really stars yet. Nicolas Cage was not a big star when we did Raising Arizona. A lot of these people were also virtually unknown, too, when we worked with them first.
‐‐ Joel Coen

The point came when people were doing things I didn't feel competent to do myself. I'm not being modest; I honestly get lost. I was lucky in spotting what I did when I did, but there comes a point where you realise what you're doing is not going to be much good.
‐‐ Peter Higgs

The point here is that physics followed the data where it seemed to lead, even though some thought the model gave aid and comfort to religion.
‐‐ Michael Behe

The point I am making is that in the more primitive forms of society the individual is merely a unit; in more developed forms of society he is an independent personality.
‐‐ Herbert Read

The point I'm trying to make is, I'm really quite neutral. I have not been conditioned.
‐‐ John Lone

The point I'm trying to make is that you go to church on Sunday. But the real Christ is out there in your life every day, whether it be the guy you help on the street, how you live your life, and your countenance that makes people want to be you.
‐‐ Jim Caviezel

The point in history at which we stand is full of promise and danger. The world will either move forward toward unity and widely shared prosperity - or it will move apart.
‐‐ Franklin D. Roosevelt

The point in me playing with Prince was to let a lot of people know that I can play trap. I don't think people know that.
‐‐ Sheila E.

The point is, how do you know the Guarantee Fairy isn't a crazy glue sniffer.
‐‐ Chris Farley

The point is not to stay marginal, but to participate in whatever network of marginal zones is spawned from other disciplinary centers and which, together, constitute a multiple displacement of those authorities.
‐‐ Judith Butler