"Poetry is to prose as dancing is to walking."
John Barrington Wain, writer (1925-1994).
"Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which
ones to keep."
Scott Adams, cartoonist (1957- ).
"Writers, like teeth, are divided into incisors and grinders."
Walter Bagehot, economist and journalist (1826-1877).
"Words without thoughts never to heaven go."
William Shakespeare, poet and dramatist (1564-1616)
"For what is a poem but a hazardous attempt at self-understanding; it
is the deepest part of autobiography."
Robert Penn Warren, novelist and poet (1905-1989).
"When in public poetry should take off its clothes and wave to the nearest
person in sight; it should be seen in the company of thieves and lovers rather than that of journalists and publishers."
Brian Patten (b. 1946), British poet.
"I have always imagined that paradise will be a kind of library."
Jorge Luis Borges, writer (1899-1986).
"Books are the bees which carry the quickening pollen from one to another
mind."
James Russell Lowell, poet, essayist, and diplomat (1819-1891).
"Ordering a man to write a poem is like commanding a pregnant woman to
give birth to a red-headed child."
Carl Sandburg, poet and biographer (1878-1967).
"I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free."
Michelangelo Buonarroti, sculptor, painter, architect, and poet (1475-1564).
"Words are like money; there is nothing so useless, unless when in actual
use."
Samuel Butler, writer (1835-1902).
"Our chief want is someone who will inspire us to be what we know we
could be."
Ralph Waldo Emerson, writer and philosopher (1803-1882).
"When power leads man towards arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations.
When power narrows the area of man’s concern, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of existence. When power
corrupts, poetry cleanses.”
John Fitzgerald Kennedy at dedication of Robert Frost Library, Amherst
College, Oct. 26, 1963.
"It's splendid to be a great writer, to put men into the frying pan of
your imagination and make them pop like chestnuts."
Gustave Flaubert, French novelist (circa 1851).
"The world in general doesn't know what to make of originality; it is
startled out of its comfortable habits of thought, and its first reaction is one of anger."
W. Somerset Maugham, writer (1874-1965)
"Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the
public and have no self."
Cyril Connolly, critic and editor (1903-1974).
"Art is a house that tries to be haunted."
Emily Dickinson, poet (1830-1886).
"A poem is never finished, only abandoned."
Paul Valery, poet and philosopher (1871-1945).
"If you have knowledge, let others light their candles in it."
Margaret Fuller, author (1810-1850).
"Every man should plant a tree, have a child and write a book. These
all live on after us, insuring a measure of immortality."
Quote from the Talmud.
"There are a thousand thoughts lying within a man that he does not know
till he takes up a pen to write."
William Makepeace Thackeray, novelist (1811-1863).
"Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice;
journalism what will be grasped at once."
Cyril Connolly, critic and editor (1903-1974).
"Poetry is the clear expression of mixed feelings."
W.H. Auden, poet (1907-1973).
"Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to
be chewed and digested."
Francis Bacon, essayist, philosopher, and statesman (1561-1626).
“Ink
is handicapped, in a way, because you can blow up a man with gunpowder in half a second, while
it may take twenty years to blow him up with a book. But the gunpowder destroys itself along with
its victim, while a book can keep on exploding for centuries.”
Christopher Morley,
writer (1890-1957)
“The cloning
of humans is on most of the lists of things to worry about from science, along with behavior control, genetic engineering,
transplanted heads, computer poetry and the unrestrained growth of plastic flowers.”
Lewis Thomas
"It is difficult to get the news from poems, yet men die miserably every
day for lack of what is found there."
William Carlos Williams M.D. - physician and poet (1883-1963).
