Joseph Brodsky Quotes

It's always nice to be able to capture your life's experiences in a song and hold the emotion in that way.

Poetry was one of the things that interested me most as I was growing up. I used to write it in my head all the time. I still think the very greatest pleasure in life is to write a poem.

I often start writing in order to excite an expansive emotion.

I've always written about things that cause me to feel something.

Yes, I do write poetry. It's very therapeutic. I'm influenced by Pablo Neruda and Gulzar Saab. It's all very personal.

I write in my own journal when something extraordinary or funny happens. And there's some nice imagery in there. I don't think of what to do with it.

Since the age of 11, I have loved writing poems and fragments from my life.

I can find some way to make poetry out of my life's experiences.

You can't help parts of yourself leaking into other characters.

In poetry, you must love the words, the ideas and the images and rhythms with all your capacity to love anything at all.

We all write poems; it is simply that poets are the ones who write in words.

I can only write a book like 'The Tin Drum' or 'From the Diary of a Snail' at a special period of my life. The books came about because of how I felt and thought at the time.

Poetry is the language we speak in the most terrifying or ecstatic passages of our lives. But the very word poetry scares people. They think of their grade school teachers reciting 'Hiawatha' and they groan.

At the touch of love everyone becomes a poet.

I began to write poetry in high school, and would ride miles over sandy roads in the fine hills around Cedar Rapids, repeating the lines over and over until I had them right, making some of the rhythm of the horse help.

I don't know what makes a guy want to write songs and sing, but if you've got a message, you want to get it across. When I come up with an idea about the way I feel, I can really state it strongly in a song.

There are two types of poets: People who write poetically about their lives, and poets that live poetically and write about it.

A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.

I do not wear my emotions on my sleeve; I write about them.

There's a desire in me to express something - to match what I hear in my head.

The more poetry you have in the head, the more poetry you will understand because you will be getting to the roots of what it is that makes people write poetry at all.

You don't have to suffer to be a poet; adolescence is enough suffering for anyone.

I was a 16-year-old girl at one point, so of course I wrote poetry.

I think poetry was always where I went to deal with my deepest feelings.

No good poem, however confessional it may be, is just a self-expression. Who on earth would claim that the pearl expresses the oyster?