Uzodinma Iweala Quotes

In school, my favourite class was when we were given a subject for an essay on which we could freewheel. And poetry: I've always written it and loved the way words interact, in meaning and in sound.

Poetry is not a matter of feelings, it is a matter of language. It is language which creates feelings.

Once they're on paper, they're gone. I like to do as much with the words, as far as image goes.

I enjoy the inventive ways in which language is manipulated to make meaning.

There are so many things that poetry is about, one of which is memory.

Writing is more about imagination than anything else. I fell in love with words. I fell in love with storytelling.

Poetry is fascinating. As soon as it begins the poetry has changed the thing into something extra, and somehow prose can go over into poetry.

Fiction is a house with many stately mansions, but also one in which it is wise, at least sometimes, to swing from the chandeliers.

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

Literature is the question minus the answer.

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

It's in literature that true life can be found. It's under the mask of fiction that you can tell the truth.

Poetry, I feel, is a tyrannical discipline. You've got to go so far so fast in such a small space; you've got to burn away all the peripherals.

I remember writing these terrible poems when I was, like, nine and discovered alliteration.

I've always loved rhyming. I love language.

I've been interested in writing and storytelling since I learned to read, but it wasn't until I read Dylan Thomas, when I was 14, that I became interested in language itself, and saw it as more than a transparent medium for a story.

Writing poems is a chance to construct spaces that I want to imaginatively inhabit.

Nonfiction speaks to the head. Fiction speaks to the heart. Poetry speaks to the soul. It's the essence of beauty. The essence of pain. It pleases the eye and the ear.

Without poetry, stories would be told in sepia.

Poets are always ahead of things in a certain way, their sense of language and their vision.

I love playing with words and texture.

A novelist can get by on story, but the poet has nothing but the words.

Poetry is the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits.

Poetry is ordinary language raised to the Nth power. Poetry is boned with ideas, nerved and blooded with emotions, all held together by the delicate, tough skin of words.

A writer is someone who can make a riddle out of an answer.