Dylan Thomas Quotes

I love to create interesting textures with language. You can do it as long as it seems like a discovery.

I like the way words go together and I like the gamesmanship of writing poetry. It is such a challenge.

Deep feeling doesn't make for good poetry. A way with language would be a bit of help.

I've always been a fan of poetry. I grew up with Lawrence Ferlinghetti and the Beat poets. I really followed that stuff for a while. I just love the way people threw words around like they were painting.

I enjoy the inventive ways in which language is manipulated to make meaning.

Poetry is a beautiful way of spoiling prose, and the laborious art of exchanging plain sense for harmony.

Poets deal in writing about feelings and trying to find the language and images for intense feelings.

Till now poets were privileged to insert a certain proportion of nonsense - very far in excess of one-half of one per cent - into their otherwise sober documents.

I try not to be overly literal. When I'm writing songs, I write down a lot of words, and then I try to simplify it. I like to give people hints or words that make visual pictures for them.

In every culture, in every language, there is expressive play, expressive word play; there's language use to different purposes that we would call poetry.

Jigging veins of rhyming mother wits.

A poem need not have a meaning and like most things in nature often does not have.

You take stuff from different places, and sometimes you stick a line in because it rhymes, not because it makes sense.

With me it's the whole thing, it's the conceit, the idea, what the poem is saying. And it goes on just as long as is necessary to say what needs to be said.

A poet is a professional maker of verbal objects.

Clarity, clarity, surely clarity is the most beautiful thing in the world, A limited, limiting clarity I have not and never did have any motive of poetry But to achieve clarity.

As a friendly one. I would still like to write concrete poems, but I can only do it sometimes.

Poets don't draw. They unravel their handwriting and then tie it up again, but differently.

I'm a failed poet. Reading poetry helps me to see the world differently, and I try to infuse my prose with figurative language, which goes against the trend in fiction.

Poetry seems to be the only weapon able to beat language, using language's own means.

I am a poet, and I speak poetically.

I like bringing my poet brain and sensibility to lyrics I write.

Who often, but without success, have prayed for apt Alliteration's artful aid.

For poets today or in any age, the choice is not between freedom on the one hand and abstruse French forms on the other. The choice is between the nullity and vanity of our first efforts, and the developing of a sense of idiom, form, structure, metre, rhythm, line - all the fundamental characteristics of this verbal art.

Rap and spoken word have reawakened the country to poetry in itself. Texting and Twitter encourage creative uses of casual language, in ways I have celebrated widely. But we've fallen behind on savoring the formal layer of our language.