John Updike Quotes

Poetry is not a matter of feelings, it is a matter of language. It is language which creates feelings.

What has always attracted me in life is poetry. Any genre can have poetry. For me, poetry contains truth.

I read mostly poetry.

Poetry is ordinary language raised to the Nth power. Poetry is boned with ideas, nerved and blooded with emotions, all held together by the delicate, tough skin of words.

I'm a poet.

I keep trying to define 'poetry,' but it's so difficult.

Poetry proceeds from the totality of man, sense, imagination, intellect, love, desire, instinct, blood and spirit together.

I believe poetry has very little to do with memory.

Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful.

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

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.

During the '70s I was interested in words and meaning as a way of making art.

All poetry is an ordered voice, one which tries to tell you about a vision in the un-visionary language of farm, city, and love.

A poet is someone who stands outside in the rain hoping to be struck by lightning.

And if they haven't got poetry in them, there's nothing you can do that will produce it.

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

No verse can give pleasure for long, nor last, that is written by drinkers of water.

Poetry is a phantom script telling how rainbows are made and why they go away.

You want to know how to rhyme, then learn how to add. It's mathematics.

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

Children seem naturally drawn to poetry - it's some combination of the rhyme, rhythm, and the words themselves.

Poetry is always slightly mysterious, and you wonder what is your relationship to it.

Poetry is more a threshold than a path.

Nonfiction speaks to the head. Fiction speaks to the heart. Poetry speaks to the soul. It's the essence of beauty. The essence of pain. It pleases the eye and the ear.

Without poetry, stories would be told in sepia.