684 Quotes About Poets

What’s the use of writing poetry for your peers? I don’t think I should sell my poetry to other poets. If that’s who my audience is, I’m dead, I’m not going to make any money.

Good or bad, positive or negative, there is no comment more insulting to a poet than one displaying that you have not properly read and considered the things they wrote.

Rare-book people have this in common with poets: they too are born, not made.

can't even sleep through the night without you and those sun-dried ginger ale complected limbs crocheted into my thighs...

Poems are like dreams: in them you put what you don't know you know.

I say, 'Get me some poets as managers.' Poets are our original systems thinkers. They contemplate the world in which we live and feel obligated to interpret, and give expression to it in a way that makes the reader understand how that world runs. Poets, those unheralded systems thinkers, are our true digital thinkers. It is from their midst that I believe we will draw tomorrow's new business leaders."--Sidney Harman, CEO Multimillionaire of a stereo components company

The Chinese poet George Wu ... recorded on his comlog: "Poets are the mad midwives to reality. They see not what is, nor what can be, but what must become." Later, on his last disk to his lover the week before he died, Wu said: "Words are the only bullets in truth's bandolier. And poets are the snipers.

Walking by yourself in the rain is for college kids who think loneliness makes poets.

The life of a poet lies not merely in the finite language-dance of expression but in the nearly infinite combinations of perception and memory combined with the sensitivity to what is perceived and remembered.