If my poetry aims to achieve anything, it's to deliver people from the limited ways in which they see and feel.
—Jim Morrison
Don’t ever think the poetry is dead in an old man because his forehead is wrinkled, or that his manhood has left him when his hand trembles! If they ever were there, they are there still.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes
I think all people would like to feel that they’re a necessary part of life. That they’re necessary in the world, and that life would be poorer if they weren’t in it. When you accomplish something, when you write good poetry, then I think you feel that the world would be slightly different if you weren’t in it. And that, I think, is part of what being needed is about.
—Kenneth Koch
We especially need imagination in science. It is not all mathematics, nor all logic, but it is somewhat beauty and poetry.
—Maria Mitchell
Sexual intercourse is kicking death in the ass while singing.
—Charles Bukowski
A poet who reads his verse in public may have other nasty habits.
—Robert A. Heinlein
I have nothing to say, and I am saying it, and that is poetry.
—John Cage
Poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.
—G. K. Chesterton
The revolt of the poet is invariably conservative at its roots. … Not politically conservative, but imaginatively conservative, with a profound regard for what is given, as earth or air, sun or moon or stars, or the dreams of man.
—Cid Corman
I owe everything to a system that made me learn by heart till I wept. As a result, I have thousands of lines of poetry by heart. I owe everything to this.
—George Steiner
I think that one possible definition of our modern culture is that it is one in which nine-tenths of our intellectuals can't read any poetry.
—Randall Jarrell
The mistake we make is to turn upon our past with angry wholesale negation. … The way of wisdom is to treat it airily, lightly, wantonly, and in a spirit of poetry; and above all to use its symbols, which are its spiritual essence, giving them a new connotation, a fresh meaning.
—John Cowper Powys
Painting is silent poetry, and poetry is painting that speaks.
—Plutarch
Dream is not a revelation. If a dream affords the dreamer some light on himself, it is not the person with closed eyes who makes the discovery but the person with open eyes, lucid enough to fit thoughts together. Dream — a scintillating mirage surrounded by shadows — is essentially poetry.
—Michel Leiris
I have spent a good many years . . . being ashamed about what I write. I think I was forty before I realized that almost every writer of fiction or poetry who has ever published a line has been accused by someone of wasting his or her God-given talent. If you write (or paint or dance or sculpt or sing, I suppose), someone will try to make you feel lousy about it, that's all.
—Stephen King