Tim Minchin Quotes

When I was 14 years old, I was crazy about Dr. Seuss. I loved the words he made up, and I just thought, 'Well, if he can make up words, then I can make up words.'

The problem with writing a book in verse is, to be successful, it has to sound like you knocked it off on a rainy Friday afternoon. It has to sound easy. When you can do it, it helps tremendously because it's a thing that forces kids to read on. You have this unconsummated feeling if you stop.

To write regular verses destroys an infinite number of fine possibilities, but at the same time it suggests a multitude of distant and totally unexpected thoughts.

I love the feeling of creating pictures in someone's mind just by spelling out the right lyrical combination.

Poetry surrounds us everywhere, but putting it on paper is, alas, not so easy as looking at it.

I can make rhymes. My style of writing is kind of childlike anyway.

Art, whatever form it takes, requires hard work, craftsmanship and creativity. As a writer, I know my grammar, cadence, the music of prose, and the art of the narrative.

I would write poems and think up melodies to them later.

When I am writing fiction, I believe I am much better organized, more methodical - one has to be when writing a novel. Writing poetry is a state of free float.

I like rhyme because it is memorable, I like form because having to work to a pattern gives me original ideas.

I despair of ever writing excellent poetry.

Let me read you some of my poetry. My poetry just takes me to another level.

When I see things in the world that leap out at me, I want to make use of them in fiction. Maybe every writer does that. It just depends on what you claim or appropriate as yours.

To me many short poems read and write like beginnings that simply whet my appetite; I want to get over that.

Gil Thorpe is a great diversion and is to book writing as poetry is to prose.

Poetry had great powers over me from my childhood, and today the poems live in my memory which I read at the age of 7 or 8 years and which drove me to desperate attempts at imitation.

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.

But I can only write what the muse allows me to write. I cannot choose, I can only do what I am given, and I feel pleased when I feel close to concrete poetry - still.

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

If you know what you are going to write when you're writing a poem, it's going to be average.

I'm a magpie in my fiction, taking whatever looks shiny and curious to line the nest of my story.

Poetry is the hardest thing that there is. It fascinates me, so I want to write more of it.

Literature, not scripture, sustains the mind and - since there is no other metaphor - also the soul.

I've always loved rhyming. I love language.