In constructing the plot and working it out with the proper diction, the poet should place the scene, as far as possible, before his eyes. In this way, seeing everything with the utmost vividness, as if he were a spectator of the action, he will discover what is in keeping with it, and be most unlikely to overlook inconsistencies.

I’ve never managed to keep a journal longer than two weeks.

I like my body when it is with your body. It is so quite new a thing. Muscles better and nerves more.

I do the same exercises I did 50 years ago and they still work. I eat the same food I ate 50 years ago and it still works.

The true spirit of delight, the exaltation, the sense of being more than Man, which is the touchstone of the highest excellence, is to be found in mathematics as surely as poetry.

Yet, it is true, poetry is delicious; the best prose is that which is most full of poetry.

To see clearly is poetry, prophecy and religion all in one.

Poetry is nearer to vital truth than history.

Always try to use the language so as to make quite clear what you mean and make sure your sentence couldn’t mean anything else.

Pure mathematics is, in its way, the poetry of logical ideas.

Men acquire a particular quality by constantly acting in a particular way.

America is a poem in our eyes; its ample geography dazzles the imagination, and it will not wait long for metres.

There are certain pursuits which, if not wholly poetic and true, do at least suggest a nobler and finer relation to nature than we know. The keeping of bees, for instance.

Poetry is the art of substantiating shadows, and of lending existence to nothing.

I read poetry to save time.

I haven’t changed at all. I’m the same as when I was 11.

Integrity means that you are the same in public as you are in private.

Ending a sentence with a preposition is something up with which I will not put.

How did it get so late so soon? Its night before its afternoon. December is here before its June. My goodness how the time has flewn. How did it get so late so soon?

Hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul – and sings the tunes without the words – and never stops at all.

Lulled in the countless chambers of the brain, our thoughts are linked by many a hidden chain; awake but one, and in, what myriads rise!

Short words are best and the old words when short are best of all.

Why should poetry have to make sense?

Every age has its own poetry; in every age the circumstances of history choose a nation, a race, a class to take up the torch by creating situations that can be expressed or transcended only through poetry.

We are time’s subjects, and time bids be gone.

What is written without effort is in general read without pleasure.

Don’t use words too big for the subject. Don’t say ‚infinitely‘ when you mean ‚very‘; otherwise you’ll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite.

He ate and drank the precious Words, his Spirit grew robust; He knew no more that he was poor, nor that his frame was Dust.

The death of a beautiful woman, is unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world.

Who shall measure the hat and violence of the poet’s heart when caught and tangled in a woman’s body?

I think that there is nothing, not even crime, more opposed to poetry, to philosophy, ay, to life itself than this incessant business.

Success is neither magical nor mysterious. Success is the natural consequence of consistently applying the basic fundamentals.

I know some people might think it odd – unworthy even – for me to have written a cookbook, but I make no apologies. The U.S. poet laureate Billy Collins thought I had demeaned myself by writing poetry for Hallmark Cards, but I am the people’s poet so I write for the people.

Part of what made the Macintosh great was that the people working on it were musicians, poets, and artists, and zoologists, and historians. They also happened to be the best computer scientists in the world. But if it hadn’t been computer science, these people would have been doing amazing things in other fields.

If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry.

I’m nobody, who are you?

I’ve always written. There’s a journal which I kept from about 9 years old. The man who gave it to me lived across the street from the store and kept it when my grandmother’s papers were destroyed. I’d written some essays. I loved poetry, still do. But I really, really loved it then.

But time has set its maggot on their track.

To be a poet is a condition, not a profession.

I always wrote poetry and stuff like that, so putting songs together wasn’t that spectacular.

Anybody with ability can play in the big leagues. But to be able to trick people year in and year out the way I did, I think that was a much greater feat.

We become what we repeatedly do.

I want to consistently play well and win titles. I’m only at the beginning.

Love is not love that alters when it alteration finds.

Happy the man whose wish and care a few paternal acres bound, content to breathe his native air in his own ground.

Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative.

The world is mud-luscious and puddle-wonderful.

Science arose from poetry… when times change the two can meet again on a higher level as friends.

We are certainly not to relinquish the evidence of experiments for the sake of dreams and vain fictions of our own devising; nor are we to recede from the analogy of Nature, which is wont to be simple and always consonant to itself.

Each book I’ve done somehow finds its own unique form, a specific way it has to be written, and once I find it, I stick with it.

Human beings love poetry. They don’t even know it sometimes… whether they’re the songs of Bono, or the songs of Justin Bieber… they’re listening to poetry.

If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot. There’s no way around these two things that I’m aware of, no shortcut.

In matters of style, swim with the current; in matters of principle, stand like a rock.

They would not find me changed from him they knew – only more sure of all I thought was true.

Doubt thou the stars are fire, Doubt that the sun doth move. Doubt truth to be a liar, But never doubt I love.

I sleep seven hours. If I go to bed at two, I wake up at nine. If I go to bed at midnight, I wake up at seven. I don’t wake up before – the house can fall apart, but I sleep for seven hours.

Certainly it is valuable to a trained writer to crash in an aircraft which burns. He learns several important things very quickly. Whether they will be of use to him is conditioned by survival. Survival, with honor, that outmoded and all-important word, is as difficult as ever and as all-important to a writer.

To be successful, you need results in a row. You can’t win, lose, win, lose.

As soon go kindle fire with snow, as seek to quench the fire of love with words.

The greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world… to see clearly is poetry, prophecy and religion all in one.

Rigid, the skeleton of habit alone upholds the human frame.