Quotes of the Day about Writing

"If I chance to talk a little wild, forgive me."
- William Shakespeare

"It took me fifteen years to discover that I had no talent for writing, but I couldn't give it up because by that time I was too famous."
- Robert Benchley

"Like stones, words are laborious and unforgiving, and the fitting of them together, like the fitting of stones, demands great patience and strength of purpose and particular skill."
- Edmund Morrison

"My aim is to put down on paper what I see and what I feel in the best and simplest way."
- Ernest Hemingway

"Only those things are beautiful which are inspired by madness and written by reason."
- Andre Gide

"Poets need not go to Niagara to write about the force of falling water."
- Robert Frost

"Put it before them briefly so they will read it, clearly so they will appreciate it, picturesquely so they will remember it, and above all, accurately so they will be guided by its light."
- Joseph Pulitzer

Poetry Quotes of the Day

“We don’t read and write poetry because it’s cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion. And medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for.”—from the movie “Dead Poets Society”

“Painting is silent poetry, and poetry is a painting that speaks.”—Simonides

“Poetry creates the myth, the prose writer draws its portrait.”—Jean-Paul Sartre

“Poetry is subconscious conversation; it is as much the work of those who understand it and those who make it.”—Sonia Sanchez

“The only thing that can save the world is the reclaiming of the awareness of the world. That's what poetry does.”—Allen Ginsberg

In science one tries to tell people, in such a way as to be understood by everyone, something that no one ever knew before. But in poetry, it's the exact opposite.”—Paul Dirac

“Poets utter great and wise things which they do not themselves understand.”—Plato

“Poetry is not sought but received. The puritan habits of hard work are not much help. Oh, they may help you get in the chair, keep you at the task, but the real lure is the gift of the word, the line that surprises.”—Donald M. Murray

“The poet knows that he speaks adequately then only when he speaks somewhat wildly, or ‘with the flower of the mind’... not with the intellect alone but with the intellect inebriated with nectar.”—Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Poetry is being, not doing.”—E.E. Cummings

Poetry Quotes of the Day

“Poets need not go to Niagara to write about the force of falling water.”—Robert Frost

“If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.”—Emily Dickinson

“Everywhere I go, I find a poet has been there before me.”—Sigmund Freud

“The business of the poet and the novelist is to show the sorriness underlying the grandest things, and the grandeur underlying the sorriest things.”—Thomas Hardy

“Don't ask a poet to explain himself. He cannot.”—Plato
“There's no money in poetry, but then there's no poetry in money either.”—Robert Graves

“Poetry should be like fireworks, packed carefully and artfully, ready to explode with unpredictable effects."—Lilian Moore

“Poetry, I feel, is a tyrannical discipline. You've got to go so far, so fast, in such a small space, that you've got to burn away all the peripherals.”—Sylvia Plath
“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

“Poetry is a deal of joy and pain and wonder, with a dash of the dictionary.”—Kahlil Gibran