Quotes for Poets...

  

  "If it sounds like writing I rewrite it. Or, if proper usage gets in the way, it may have to go. I can't allow what we learned in English composition to disrupt the sound and rythm of the narrative."
     - Elmore Leonard 

 The person born with a talent they are meant to use will find their greatest happiness in using it. 

    - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

        "A poet can survive everything but a misprint."

 

        - Oscar Wilde

 "My trouble is I'm the sort of writer who only finds out what he's getting at 

by the time he's got to the end of it."

     - Christopher Fry

    "It is perfectly okay to write garbage—as long as you edit brilliantly."
    - C. J. Cherryh

        "Great is the art of beginning, but greater is the art of ending."

        - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

        The difference between the right word and almost the right word is the difference between lightning and the lightning bug.

 - Unknown

 

   "For me the initial delight is in the surprise of remembering something I didn't know I knew. I have never started a poem yet whose end I knew. Writing a poem is discovering"

    - Robert Frost

        Always be a poet, even in prose.

 

        - Charles Baudelaire

                                               “I don’t need an alarm clock. My ideas wake me.”

                                                                     - Ray Bradbury, WD

“Write while the heat is in you. 

The writer who postpones the recording of his thoughts 

uses an iron which has cooled to burn a hole with.”    

- Henry David Thoreau

    “Style is to forget all styles.”

    - Jules Renard

    Don’t bend; don’t water it down; don’t try to make it logical; don’t edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.  

    - Franz Kafka 

     "Writing poetry is a process of discovery... you can smell the poem before you see it

 ...Like some animal." 

  - Denise Levertov

                        "I only achieve simplicity with enormous effort."

                                               - Clarice Lispector

“I think all writing is a disease. You can’t stop it.”
- William Carlos Williams

     "You never know when you begin a poem, what it has in store for you."
    - Charles Simic

    "If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then don’t write..."
    - Anaïs Nin

"I can’t write five words but that I change seven."
- Dorothy Parker

    "What I want to do in a poem is discover what it is that I have to say."

     - Mark Strand

 

“Write. Rewrite. When not writing or rewriting, read. I know of no shortcuts.”
- Larry L. King 

    "Write what you have not been willing to speak about. Be willing to be split open."

    - Natalie Goldberg