Famous Poet Quotes

Is 'vagina' suitable for use
in a sonnet? I don't suppose so.
A famous poet told me, 'Vagina's ugly.'
Meaning, of course, the sound of it. In poems.
Meanwhile he inserts his penis frequently
into his verse, calling it seriously, 'My
Penis'. It is short, I know, and dignified.
I mean of course the sound of it. In poems. ~ Joan Larkin

I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet. ~ Sylvia Plath

Adversity turns into advantage
With the use of our will
Don't wish for less challenge
But for more skill ~ BJ Klock

When he was in college, a famous poet made a useful distinction for him. He had drunk enough in the poet's company to be compelled to describe to him a poem he was thinking of. It would be a monologue of sorts, the self-contemplation of a student on a summer afternoon who is reading Euphues. The poem itself would be a subtle series of euphuisms, translating the heat, the day, the student's concerns, into symmetrical posies; translating even his contempt and boredom with that famously foolish book into a euphuism.

The poet nodded his big head in a sympathetic, rhythmic way as this was explained to him, then told him that there are two kinds of poems. There is the kind you write; there is the kind you talk about in bars. Both kinds have value and both are poems; but it's fatal to confuse them.

In the Seventh Saint, many years later, it had struck him that the difference between himself and Shakespeare wasn't talent - not especially - but nerve. The capacity not to be frightened by his largest and most potent conceptions, to simply (simply!) sit down and execute them. The dreadful lassitude he felt when something really large and multifarious came suddenly clear to him, something Lear-sized yet sonnet-precise. If only they didn't rush on him whole, all at once, massive and perfect, leaving him frightened and nerveless at the prospect of articulating them word by scene by page. He would try to believe they were of the kind told in bars, not the kind to be ~ John Crowley

Now I would say at any given moment in American life, there are probably 45 poets in airplanes vectoring across the country heading towards ... I don't know if anyone's reading it, but poets are still flying around the country going from lectern to lectern.That circuitry has become very well-established. ~ Billy Collins

Sometimes it's frustrating if I'm out with the kids and have to deal with the paparazzi. That comes with it though. But it was fun becoming famous. I mean, I even wanted to one of the kids in FAME when I was growing up. ~ Victoria Beckham

JUSTICE: .... I like being famous enough to have gossip about me. ~ Bijou Hunter

Albert Einstein, who discovered that a tiny amount of mass is equal to a huge amount of energy, which explains why, as Einstein himself so eloquently put it in a famous 1939 speech to the Physics Department at Princeton, 'You have to exercise for a week to work off the thigh fat from a single Snickers.' ~ Dave Barry

But where does by far the bulk, the whole ambulance load, of pain really come from? Where must it come from? Isn't the true poet or painter a seer? Isn't he, actually, the only seer we have
on earth? Most apparently not the scientist, most emphatically not the psychiatrist. ~ J.D. Salinger

Don't pack your bags just yet, stay awhile,
Don't try to run away to higher ground,
You're in my twisted clouds of sad misfortune,
And you are such an entertaining crowd!
(I've never had such cheerful toys to play with...)
Forget I said that – just a little natural disaster Humour,
Ha-ha-ha.

Pull up a rusty lawn chair
On the waterfront in New Orleans,
And ignore the wind that howls,
Things aren't always as they seem.
I can smell fear in the air,
Fresh amidst the cornbread steam,
Forgive me if I sound excited,
(I'm going to be famous, you know!)
And let me take your money, please!

I'll drown your family, hunt down your pets,
I've got tricks that I've never even tried yet,
And it's so easy when I get the chance!
(I'll swipe your house in just one glance!)

As the saying goes, it all comes out in the wash,
But I'm the only wash that leaves no stone unturned,
Financial devastation is my middle name,
And social degradation is my third!

You, little boy from the bayou bank,
You used to fish for pointless fun
(I can appreciate having fun),
But after I go, you'll find your parents poor,
You'll have eviction notices on your door,
You'll have to sell any fish you can catch,
In a desperate grasp for money,
Although I hate to break it to you,
That bayou's polluted, honey!
I see nothing in your future ~ Rebecca McNutt

The German poet Goethe once said that "he who cannot draw on three thousand years is living from hand to mouth." I don't want you to end up in such a sad state. I will do what I can to acquaint you with your historical roots. It is the only way to become a human being. It is the only way to become more than a naked ape. It is the only way to avoid floating in a vacuum. ~ Jostein Gaarder

My stupidity gave its blessing to succouring nature, on her knees before God.
What I am (my drunken laughter and happiness) is nonetheless at stake, handed over to chance, thrown out into the night, chased away like a dog.
The wind of truth responded like a slap to piety's extended cheek.
The heart is human to the extent that it rebels (this means: to be a man is 'not to bow down before the law').
A poet doesn't justify - he doesn't accept - nature completely. True poetry is outside laws. But poetry ultimately accepts poetry.
When to accept poetry changes it into its opposite (it becomes the mediator of an acceptance!) I hold back the leap in which I would exceed the universe, I justify the given world, I content myself with it ~ Georges Bataille

I'm just a guy who happens to work in public from time to time. I've built a reputation as an established comic, not as a celebrity - a celebrity is someone who is famous but doesn't do anything. ~ Dylan Moran

A person hoping to become a poet must have the capacity of thinking of several things at a time. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

I've worked throughout California as a poet: in colleges, universities, worker camps, migrant education offices, continuation high schools, juvenile halls, prisons, and gifted classrooms. ~ Juan Felipe Herrera

As for the story, whether the poet takes it ready made or constructs it for himself, he should first sketch its general outline, and then fill in the episodes and amplify in detail. ~ Aristotle.

"You cannot believe what you are saying." "Well, no. Hardly ever. But the philosopher is like the poet. The latter composes ideal letters for an ideal nymph, only to plumb with his words the depths of passion. The philosopher tests the coldness of his gaze, to see how far he can undermine the fortress of bigotry." ~ Umberto Eco

I like to mix it up, because the kind of comments you can get from a fiction writer about your poetry are going to be very different than what you'll get from a poet. ~ Sandra Cisneros

Explanation is always incomplete: we can always raise another Why-questions. And the new why-questions may lead to a new theory which not only "explains" the old theory but corrects it.
This is why the evolution of Physics is likely to be an endless process of correction and better approximation. And even if one day we should reach a stage where our theories were no longer open to correction, because they are simply true, they would still not be complete - and we should know it. For Godel's famous incompleteness theorem would come into play: in view of the Mathematical background of Physics, at best an infinite sequence of such true theories would be needed in order to answer the problems which any given (formalized) theory would be undecidable.
Such considerations do not prove that the objective physical world is incomplete, or undetermined: they only show the essential incompleteness of our efforts. But they also show that it's barely possible (if possible at all) for science to reach a stage in which it can provide genuine support for the view that the physical world is deterministic. Why, the, should we not accept the verdict of common sense- at least until these arguments have been refuted? ~ Karl Popper

Before men ever wrote in clay they cast their words in verse and line, rythymbound in poets' minds, defying time and age. ~ Dave Beard

Horace once told me that laws were powerless against the private passions of the human heart, and only he who has no power over it, such as the poet or the philosopher, may persuade the human spirit to virtue. ~ John Williams

When I was 10, my parents really valued success in the arts, and I thought if I was a famous 'something artistic,' that they would love me more. ~ Sia Furler

Some moralist or mythological poet
Compares the solitary soul to a swan;
I am satisfied with that,
Satisfied if a troubled mirror show it,
Before that brief gleam of its life be gone ... ~ William Butler Yeats

The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different than that from which it is torn. ~ T. S. Eliot

I teach a lecture course on American poetry to as many as 150 students. For a lot of them, it's their only elective, so this is their one shot. They'll take the Russian Novel or American Poetry, so I want to give them the high points, the inescapable poets. ~ Robert Hass

Now the Gielgud Theater is a very famous old theater, because it was originally called the Globe, and the Globe is where my mother made her very first professional appearance in London, was at the Globe Theater. ~ Angela Lansbury

Constantly falling back into an old trap, before I am even fully aware of it, I find myself wondering why someone hurt me, rejected me, or didn't pay attention to me. Without realizing it, I find myself brooding about someone else's success, my own loneliness, and the way the world abuses me. Despite my conscious intentions, I often catch myself daydreaming about becoming rich, powerful, and very famous. All of these mental games reveal to me the fragility of my faith that I am the Beloved One on whom God's favor rests. I am so afraid of being disliked, blamed, put aside, passed over, ignored, persecuted, and killed that I am constantly developing strategies to defend myself and thereby assure myself of the love I think I need and deserve. And in so doing I move far away from my father's home and choose to dwell in a "distant country," (pp. 41 & 42). ~ Henri J.M. Nouwen

Yet Byron never made tea as you do, who fill the pot so that when you put the lid on the tea spills over. There is a brown pool on the table
it is running among your books and papers. Now you mop it up, clumsily, with your pocket-hankerchief. You then stuff your hankerchief back into your pocket
that is not Byron; that is so essentially you that if I think of you in twenty years' time, when we are both famous, gouty and intolerable, it will be by that scene: and if you are dead, I shall weep. ~ Virginia Woolf

Comedy has to be done en clair. You can't blunt the edge of wit or the point of satire with obscurity. Try to imagine a famous witty saying that is not immediately clear. ~ James Thurber

The job of the poet (a job which can't be learned) consists of placing those objects of the visible world which have become invisible due to the glue of habit, in an unusual position which strikes the soul and gives them a tragic force. ~ Jean Cocteau

Once upon a time," Nora said, as she fluttered a series of kisses over his shoulders that sent every nerve in his body reeling, "a very poor girl from a fucked-up family became a famous writer with a wicked pen and an even more wicked tongue who made seven figures a year. And she went everywhere she wanted to and did everything she wanted to. And nobody ever tried to stop her. And she had her own pet Angel who needed to learn how to talk. So guess what she did?"
"What?" Michael asked. He laughed in surprise as Nora slammed him down onto his back and slid on top of him. She brought her mouth onto his and forced his lips apart.
"She gave him her tongue. ~ Tiffany Reisz

Bhutan all but bases its identity upon its loneliness, and its refusal to b assimilated into India, or Tibet, or Nepal. Vietnam, at present, is a pretty girl with her face pressed up against the window of the dance hall, waiting to be invited in; Iceland is the mystic poet in the corner, with her mind on other things. Argentina longs to be part of the world it left and, in its absence, re-creates the place it feels should be its home; Paraguay simply slams the door and puts up a Do Not Disturb sign. Loneliness and solitude, remoteness and seclusion, are many worlds apart. ~ Pico Iyer

To be a poet did not occur to me. It was indeed a threshold guarded by demons. ~ Harold Bloom

When I was young and knew Virginia Woolf slightly, I learned something that startled me - that a person may be ultrasensitive and not warm. She was intensely curious and plied one with questions, teasing, charming questions that made the young person glow at being even for a moment the object of her attention. But I did feel at times as though I were "a specimen American young poet" to be absorbed and filed away in the novelist's store of vicarious experience. Then one had also the daring sense that anything could be said, the sense of freedom that was surely one of the keys to the Bloomsbury ethos, a shared secret amusement at human folly or pretensions. She was immensely kind to have seen me for at least one tea, as she did for some years whenever I was in England, but in all that time I never felt warmth, and this was startling. ~ May Sarton

Dear Bill (O'Reilly) ... I am concerned that you have been losing touch with reality recently. Did you really say you are more powerful than any politician?
That reminds me of the famous story about Squeaky the Chicago Mouse. It seems that Squeaky was floating on his back along the Chicago River one day. Approaching the Michigan Avenue lift bridge, he called out: Raise the bridge! I have an erection! ~ Roger Ebert

Unfortunately, we don't have all that many good examples to follow. The people that our cultures label as "successful" are the ones who have become wealthy or famous or celebrities, but the truly successful people
those who have become happy and who are living happy, loving, giving lives
aren't often featured in our newspapers or newscasts. We see the politicians and the criminals and the athletes and the entertainment "stars," but we don't see the people who can truly inspire us to be happy by being just who we are. ~ Tom Walsh

Funnel

The family story tells, and it was told true,
of my great-grandfather who begat eight
genius children and bought twelve almost-new
grand pianos. He left a considerable estate
when he died. The children honored their
separate arts; two became moderately famous,
three married and fattened their delicate share
of wealth and brilliance. The sixth one was
a concert pianist. She had a notable career
and wore cropped hair and walked like a man,
or so I heard when prying a childhood car
into the hushed talk of the straight Maine clan.
One died a pinafore child, she stays her five
years forever. And here is one that wrote-
I sort his odd books and wonder his once alive
words and scratch out my short marginal notes
and finger my accounts.
back from that great-grandfather I have come
to tidy a country graveyard for his sake,
to chat with the custodian under a yearly sun
and touch a ghost sound where it lies awake.
I like best to think of that Bunyan man
slapping his thighs and trading the yankee sale
for one dozen grand pianos. it fit his plan
of culture to do it big. On this same scale
he built seven arking houses and they still stand.
One, five stories up, straight up like a square
box, still dominates its coastal edge of land.
It is rented cheap in the summer musted air
to sneaker-footed families who pad through
its ro ~ Anne Sexton

I believe that it is important for the artist, painter, poet, dancer, etc. to keep in mind that it is the art that drives the art world and not the other way around. Artists and other people of intelligence have the power to bring deeper content to our culture. ~ Thornton Willis

Courage is very important. Like a muscle, it is strengthened by use. ~ Ruth Gordon

You like that poet, Bukowski?" "Yeah," I answered, confused. "Don't try." "I don't understand." "That's what it says, on Bukowski's grave. ~ Kami Garcia

My famous quote comes from my Storybook for Children Titled "Where's the Soda Tub"? Author Migdalia Torres

We are Bears, We are not suppose to be afraid of the Dark and Dangerous Woods ~ Migdalia Torres

Those who would live beyond their nature-given span lose their framework, and with it lose a proper sense of relationship to those who are younger, gaining only the resentment of youth for encroaching on its careers and resources. The fact that there is a limited right time to do the rewarding things in our lives is what creates the urgency to do them. Otherwise, we might stagnate in procrastination. The very fact that at our backs, as the poet cautions his coy mistress, we "always hear / Time's winged chariot hurrying near" enhances the world and makes the time priceless. ~ Sherwin B. Nuland

That is my essential reason for writing, not for fame, not to be celebrated after death, but to heighten and create life all around me. I also write because when I am writing I reach the high moment of fusion sought by the mystics, the poets, the lovers, a sense of communion with the universe. ~ Anais Nin

But you, oh gardener, poet that you be / Though unaware, now use your seeds like words / And make them lilt with color nicely flung ... ~ Vita Sackville-West

But if you don't have that memory of being loved, you are condemned to search the world for something to fill you up. But no matter how much money you make or how famous you become, you will still feel empty. What you are really searching for is unconditional love, unqualified acceptance. And that was the one thing that was denied to you at birth. ~ Michael Jackson