The poetry from the eighteenth century was prose; the prose from the seventeenth century was poetry.

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 never see thy face but I think upon hell-fire.

I was reading the dictionary. I thought it was a poem about everything.

A subject for a great poet would be God’s boredom after the seventh day of creation.

All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling.

I’m happy to be a writer – of prose, poetry, every kind of writing. Every person in the world who isn’t a recluse, hermit or mute uses words. I know of no other art form that we always use.

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.

Where every something, being blent together turns to a wild of nothing.

How far that little candle throws its beams! So shines a good deed in a naughty world.

Fiction is the truth inside the lie.

Humor has justly been regarded as the finest perfection of poetic genius.

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

Poets utter great and wise things which they do not themselves understand.

The poetry you read has been written for you, each of you – black, white, Hispanic, man, woman, gay, straight.

I never liked Hans Christian Andersen because I knew he was always getting at me.

A man ought to read just as inclination leads him, for what he reads as a task will do him little good.

Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity.

What makes all doctrines plain and clear? About two hundred pounds a year. And that which was proved true before, prove false again? Two hundred more.

All right, then, I’ll go to hell.

I liked to write from the time I was about 12 or 13. I loved to read. And since I only spoke to my brother, I would write down my thoughts. And I think I wrote some of the worst poetry west of the Rockies. But by the time I was in my 20s, I found myself writing little essays and more poetry – writing at writing.

All that is gold does not glitter, not all those who wander are lost; the old that is strong does not wither, deep roots are not reached by the frost.

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.

A truly good book teaches me better than to read it. I must soon lay it down, and commence living on its hint. What I began by reading, I must finish by acting.

The chief glory of every people arises from its authors.

The first man to compare the cheeks of a young woman to a rose was obviously a poet; the first to repeat it was possibly an idiot.

A great value of antiquity lies in the fact that its writings are the only ones that modern men still read with exactness.

For me, I used to be shy towards journalism because it wasn’t poetry. And then I realized that the events that I covered in essays that became journalism were actually great because they inspired me, and they became my muse.

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

I would define, in brief, the poetry of words as the rhythmical creation of Beauty.

I think a poet is anybody who wouldn’t call himself a poet.

Dickens is one of those authors who are well worth stealing.

If I’m the people’s poet, then I ought to be in people’s hands – and, I hope, in their heart.

The poets are only the interpreters of the gods.

The figure a poem makes. It begins in delight and ends in wisdom… in a clarification of life – not necessarily a great clarification, such as sects and cults are founded on, but in a momentary stay against confusion.

In my younger days, I was trying to write sophisticated prose and fantastic stories.

Every heart sings a song, incomplete, until another heart whispers back. Those who wish to sing always find a song. At the touch of a lover, everyone becomes a poet.

Hence poetry is something more philosophic and of graver import than history, since its statements are rather of the nature of universals, whereas those of history are singulars.

Books serve to show a man that those original thoughts of his aren’t very new at all.

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

The ear is the only true writer and the only true reader.

Every author in some way portrays himself in his works, even if it be against his will.

Love is a smoke made with the fume of sighs.

One merit of poetry few persons will deny: it says more and in fewer words than prose.

A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.

I don’t think I’ve ever read poetry, ever. I’m not really book-smart.

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

I spend a lot of time reading.

O Day of days when we can read! The reader and the book, either without the other is naught.

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered weak and weary.

No book includes the entire world. It’s limited. And so it doesn’t seem like an aesthetic compromise to have to do that. There’s so much other material to write about.

A novel is never anything, but a philosophy put into images.

The bookful blockhead, ignorantly read, With loads of learned lumber in his head.

You see, I am trying in all my stories to get the feeling of the actual life across – not to just depict life – or criticize it – but to actually make it alive. So that when you have read something by me, you actually experience the thing. You can’t do this without putting in the bad and the ugly as well as what is beautiful.

These poems, with all their crudities, doubts, and confusions, are written for the love of Man and in praise of God, and I’d be a damn‘ fool if they weren’t.

If to do were as easy as to know what were good to do, chapels had been churches, and poor men’s cottage princes‘ palaces.

My favourite poem is the one that starts ‚Thirty days hath September‘ because it actually tells you something.

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

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.

Long stormy spring-time, wet contentious April, winter chilling the lap of very May; but at length the season of summer does come.

Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars – mere globs of gas atoms. I, too, can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more?