Binyavanga Wainaina Quotes

I've always loved rhyming. I love language.

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

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

I hear a little firecracker go off when you come up with a good rhyme.

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

I keep trying to define 'poetry,' but it's so difficult.

All poetry is an ordered voice, one which tries to tell you about a vision in the un-visionary language of farm, city, and love.

I am always pleased to be asked to write a poem.

What has always attracted me in life is poetry. Any genre can have poetry. For me, poetry contains truth.

Poetry is a deal of joy and pain and wonder, with a dash of the dictionary.

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.

Poetry is its own medium; it's very different than writing prose. Poetry can talk in an imagistic sense, it has particular ways of catching an environment.

I love an imperfect rhyme.

I'm a wizard at poetry.

Poems are a form of music, and language just happens to be our instrument - language and breath.

I'm really into poetry.

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

Many of today's verses are prose and bad prose.

Poetry consists in a rhyming dictionary and things seen.

Prose is all about embellishing and describing.

Poetry must have something in it that is barbaric, vast and wild.

Lyricists play with words.

I read mostly poetry.

Form is endlessly interesting to me, and I love poetry as a formal enterprise.

I try to show what it is about language and music that enthralls, because I think those are the two elements of poetry.