Dorothy L. Sayers Quotes

Words are my passion / And out of them and me / I would create beauty.

He is exactly the poem I wanted to write.

I wanted to write the most beautiful poem but that is impossible; the world has written its own.

Words, yes, formulating things, creating something from your heart, it is something very necessary, yes.

I'm a writer, first and foremost, and I sort of take my cues from the songwriters of the '70s, who are talking about what's really important to them.

Personality is everything in art and poetry.

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

Language is a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, while all the time we long to move the stars to pity.

I was a serious poet for quite a while and had little notebooks filled with poetry.

The exact day I became a poet was April 1, 1965, the day I bought my first typewriter.

I think poetry is as old as language, and both come out of the same thing - an effort to try to express something that is inexpressible.

I think that's what poets try to do: They try to sidestep neurology and go straight to meaning.

The older I get and the more iconic the piece, I believe that it's wise to watch a bit and become inspired and take moments that feel so connected to the story and also connected to me that I feel like I can make a part of my own performance.

Marvin Gaye said there's a song inside of me and I can't get it out. And I know it's in there, and I can feel that it's in there, and I can't get it out. There's so much that I want to say, and I haven't been able to figure out how to say it in my art. I can only say it in ham-fisted, clumsy, nonpoetic ways, and I'm trying to figure out how to talk about life and talk about love and talk about pain and trials and tribulation in an artistic form.

Writing is the starting point from which all goodness (and crappiness) flows.

I started with poetry because it was direct, immediate, and short. It was the ecstasy of striking matches in the dark.

My 'must-have' was poetry. From the first, life meant that to me. And, fortunately, poetry is not purchasable material, but an atmosphere in which every life may expand. I found it everywhere about me.

No place is a place until it has found its poet.

Take a step, breathe in the world, give it out again in story, poem, song, art.

Anyone can express himself or herself, but what writers and poets want to do in their work, more than simply express themselves, is communicate.

We can understand poetry from a billion - in a billion styles, experiment, tradition, combination, spice, meter, image. It's all there for the poet and for the listener and for all of us.

Poem in other words may or may not result from inspiration but must (in reader and author alike) produce it--

Slowly I would get to pen and paper, Make my poems for others unseen and unborn. In the day I would be reminded of those men and women, Brave, setting up signals across vast distances, considering a nameless way of living, of almost unimagined values.

She [Carol Parsinan] somehow read my poems and came back to me and convinced me that I could be a poet, that I had the passion and the enthusiasm and the creativity to become a poet, but that what I was writing was not poetry because I was just expressing my feelings and I wasn't try to make anything.

The poet is he who inspires, rather than he who is inspired.