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

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.

Modern poets talk against business, poor things, but all of us write for money. Beginners are subjected to trial by market.

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

As a comedian, I found this thing, this profession, that suits my mind and life force. To drop it to do something else? I just don’t get that.

And whether you’re an honest man, or whether you’re a thief, depends on whose solicitor has given me my brief.

I started out in life as a poet; I was only writing poetry all through my 20s. It wasn’t until I was about 30 that I got serious about writing prose. While I was writing poems, I would often divert myself by reading detective novels; I liked them.

For me, a paragraph in a novel is a bit like a line in a poem. It has its own shape, its own music, its own integrity.

The great liability of the engineer compared to men of other professions is that his works are out in the open where all can see them. His acts, step by step, are in hard substance. He cannot bury his mistakes in the grave like the doctors. He cannot argue them into thin air or blame the judge like the lawyers.

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.

May I kiss you then? On this miserable paper? I might as well open the window and kiss the night air.

You hesitate to stab me with a word, and know not – silence is the sharper sword.

But let there be spaces in your togetherness and let the winds of the heavens dance between you. Love one another but make not a bond of love: let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls.

I consider myself a poet first and a musician second. I live like a poet and I’ll die like a poet.

What inspires me about rap is that it’s written in an almost poetic way. I just think it’s so cool.

Poetry is what gets lost in translation.

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.

O! Let me not be mad, not mad, sweet heaven; keep me in temper; I would not be mad!

The best augury of a man’s success in his profession is that he thinks it the finest in the world.

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

Two roads diverged in a wood and I – I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.

I write some country music. There’s a song called ‚I Hope You Dance.‘ Incredible. I was going to write that poem; somebody beat me to it.

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.

Do not go gentle into that good night but rage, rage against the dying of the light.

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

The profession of book writing makes horse racing seem like a solid, stable business.

Teach not thy lip such scorn, for it was made For kissing, lady, not for such contempt.

For different roles, my condition and training and diet does alter. Depending on the role, it will really dictate the type of training I do.

There is no Frigate like a book to take us lands away nor any coursers like a page of prancing Poetry.

My role in society, or any artist’s or poet’s role, is to try and express what we all feel. Not to tell people how to feel. Not as a preacher, not as a leader, but as a reflection of us all.

June Jordan, who died of cancer in 2002, was a brilliant, fierce, radical, and frequently furious poet. We were friends for thirty years. Not once in that time did she step back from what was transpiring politically and morally in the world. She spoke up, and led her students, whom she adored, to do the same.

Poetry surrounds us everywhere, but putting it on paper is, alas, not so easy as looking at it.

A cherub’s face, a reptile all the rest.

Poetry is the lifeblood of rebellion, revolution, and the raising of consciousness.

Poetry is a deal of joy and pain and wonder, with a dash of the dictionary.

How happy is the blameless vestal’s lot? The world forgetting, by the world forgot.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep. But I have promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep.

Love is a smoke made with the fume of sighs.

Writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down.

Why should poetry have to make sense?

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

Most poets are young simply because they have not been caught up. Show me an old poet, and I’ll show you, more often than not, either a madman or a master… it’s when you begin to lie to yourself in a poem in order simply to make a poem that you fail. That is why I do not rework poems.

The poet, being an imitator like a painter or any other artist, must of necessity imitate one of three objects – things as they were or are, things as they are said or thought to be, or things as they ought to be. The vehicle of expression is language – either current terms or, it may be, rare words or metaphors.

I felt like my favorite writers have almost musical hooks in their work, whether it’s poetry or a hook at the end of a chapter that makes you want to read the next one. And I think that my favorite writers definitely have something musical about what they do, in saying something so relatable and universal and so simple.

The poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.

At ev’ry word a reputation dies.

The learned is happy, nature to explore; The fool is happy, that he knows no more.

On the subject of literary genres, I’ve always felt that my response to poetry is inadequate. I’d love to be the kind of person that drifts off into the garden with a slim volume of Elizabethan verse or a sheaf of haikus, but my passion is story.

Every person who has mastered a profession is a skeptic concerning it.

Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words.

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

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

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.

Love possesses not nor will it be possessed, for love is sufficient unto love.

And were an epitaph to be my story I’d have a short one ready for my own. I would have written of me on my stone: I had a lover’s quarrel with the world.

Being a hero is about the shortest-lived profession on earth.

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

Beauties in vain their pretty eyes may roll; charms strike the sight, but merit wins the soul.

It’s not easy to define poetry.

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

I’ve been writing poems since I was in the Navy – to Rosalynn. I found I could say things in poems that I never could in prose. Deeper, more personal things. I could write a poem about my mother that I could never tell my mother. Or feelings about being on a submarine that I would have been too embarrassed to share with fellow submariners.