David Shields Quotes

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.

I would never write a sentence that didn't have a nice rhythm, or at least I wouldn't leave it to be published like that. It seems to me that prose mustn't be prosaic.

Poetry is not only a set of words which are chosen to relate to each other; it is something which goes much further than that to provide a glimpse of our vision of the world.

I would not be able to pen an academic and dry diatribe. I have too much talent for that.

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

Poetry is truth in its Sunday clothes.

A poet is a nightingale, who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds.

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

When you're telling stories, you are actually trying to illuminate some portion of the truth in an artful way. The story may immediately seem to be a lie, but it's like an impressionistic painting - you see the light and the color better than you would with a photo-realistic piece.

I'm a poet, and I spent my life in poetry.

I started writing poetry in high school because I wanted desperately to write, but somehow, writing stories didn't appeal to me, and I loved the flow and the feel and sense of poetry, especially that of what one might call formal verse.

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.

Beauty is not all there is of poetry. It must contain the truth. It is not simply an oak, rude and grand, neither is it simply a vine. It is both. Around the oak of truth runs the vine of beauty.

Poetry is the art of uniting pleasure with truth.

In those days, it didn't take much imagination to come up with something that required great lyric development skills. You just thought of an experience that you might have gone through, and write it down.

With poets, the choice of words is invariably more telling than the story line; that's why the best of them dread the thought of their biographies being written.

You can read my stuff; there are not very many quotes. It's more impressionistic.

The best public poems aren't necessarily those that go at the subject like a bull at a gate.

I think that you certainly don't have to be aged and travel the world to write a poem.

The talent of a true writer and poet is in the ear.

I do not think of literature as something confessional or therapeutic. I make sentences in order to be precise about experiences and things. I am urged by many things and no things in particular.

Poetry is something I love to do. Good poetry has an amazing ability to be communicative before it's even understood. I get emotional just from the beauty of words.

Twittering and blogging and all that is fine, but there is no idea of how to phrase something beautifully; how to use language to create an emotion. It's just passing information and sometimes very superficial information.

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.