Lorde Quotes

I began writing poems when I was about eight, with a heavy assist from my mother. She read me Arthur Waley's translations and Whitman and Robinson Jeffers, who have been lifelong influences on me. My father read Keats to me, and then he read more Keats while I was lying on the sofa struggling with asthma.

I guess I started writing poetry and stuff and then decided to set it to music.

I wanted to become a writer and felt that poetry was perfected language, so having it in my subconscious mind would make the music of language always available to me.

Poets are seen as the caretakers of language, so working with words no matter what the form is what we do.

My father was a classical musician and my mother was a writer.

I look for poetry in English because it's the only language I read.

There's not a good poet I know who has not at the beck and call of his memory a vast quantity of poetry that composes his mental library.

The crown of literature is poetry.

Instead of trying to come up and pontificate on what literature is, you need to talk with children, to teachers, and make sure they get poetry in the curriculum early.

Without literature my life would be miserable.

I always wrote poetry and stuff like that, so putting songs together wasn't that spectacular.

The public is probably more suspicious of poets than women, and maybe for good reason.

I have my Poetry 180 project, which I've made my main project. We encourage high schools, because that's really where, for most people, poetry dies off and gets buried under other adolescent pursuits.

I am not quite a poet but I am something of the kind.

I always thought I was going to be a great poet, and go and live in New York, where the great poets lived - you know, where Whitman had walked the streets.

Originally, I wanted to be a composer. I always tell people, 'I think of myself as a composer.'

I can't say that I'm always writing in my head but I do spend a lot of time in my head writing or coming up with ideas. And what I do usually is write the music and melody and then, you know, maybe the basic idea. But when I feel that I don't have a song or just say, God, please give me another song. And I just am quiet and it happens.

I would love to be the poet laureate of Coney Island.

I have the feeling that a lot of poets writing now are - they sort of tap dance through it.

I am a patriot, but I must say that English poetry is the richest in the world.

Careers don't interest me. The only thing that interests me is continuing to be a poet on one level or another, whether acting or writing or directing.

I shall, in due time, be a Poet.

I just want to write a great lyric and write a great song, and everything else is icing on the cake.

I always knew that was what I wanted to do - to write, particularly poetry.

I just remember really loving words and writing about anything I could, and the way I'd remember things, like my library card number, was to make a melody.