Carol Ann Duffy Quotes

Well, I still write poetry, but I wouldn't call myself a poet.

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

We all write poems; it is simply that poets are the ones who write in words.

If it is an imperfect word, no external circumstance can heighten its value as poetry.

I'd kill to be a poet.

In fact, in lyric poetry, truthfulness becomes recognizable as a ring of truth within the medium itself.

The only nice poets I've ever met were bad poets, and a bad poet is not a poet at all - ergo, I've never met a nice poet.

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

Anyone who holds a pen these days thinks he or she is a poet.

I have been writing poetry for a long time now. I started writing in my school days.

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

Gregory Corso used to get really pissed when people called Bob Dylan a 'poet.' After writing poetry for a few years, I can understand that.

It's the combination of the intimate and the public that I find so exciting about being poet laureate.

While I've had a great distaste for what's usually called song in modern poetry or for what's usually called music, I really don't think of speech as so far from song.

All poetry has to do is to make a strong communication. All the poet has to do is listen. The poet is not an important fellow. There will also be another poet.

Poetry itself hasn't been well served by poets who fled to the margins.

If, at a party, I say I'm a poet, people have a hard time responding, almost as if I'd said I'm a priest.

I think a poet is anybody who wouldn't call himself a poet.

I don't try to call myself a poet. But I know that my stuff is pretty literal, in that the themes are pretty simple and on the surface.

For sure I once thought of myself as the poet who would save the ordinary from oblivion.

And if they haven't got poetry in them, there's nothing you can do that will produce it.

I am not at all clear what free verse is anymore. That's one of the things you learn not to know.

The reason a poet is a poet is to write poems, not to advertise himself as a poet.

Verse in itself does not constitute poetry. Verse is only an elegant vestment for a beautiful form. Poetry can express itself in prose, but it does so more perfectly under the grace and majesty of verse. It is poetry of soul that inspires noble sentiments and noble actions as well as noble writings.

No bad man can be a good poet.