Jason Reynolds Quotes

A great poet is the most precious jewel of a nation.

I didn't know who Langston Hughes was till he met me backstage.

I defer to all these other American poets who, for some reason, I both envy and admire.

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

Nobody really knows whether they are a poet. I knew I was interested from the age of 15.

It's very important to me to be an American poet, a Jewish poet, a poet who came of age in the 1960s.

I don't think anybody is a poet 24/7, only in those rare moments when a person is producing a poem.

If I had to name one book that has had the most lasting influence on my work, I would pick 'The Big Sea' by Langston Hughes.

I'm inspired by the poets, so I'm always going to give in that direction, rather than in any other. It's the making of me... and also the downfall of me.

It's absolutely crucial to maintain my life as a poet.

But you'd have a job to find many of my poems which would seem to be very influenced by a particular person.

My father read poetry to me, encouraged me to memorize poems. But the writing of it was quite a different thing.

I've always tried to be a poet more than anything else. I mean, professional musicians die.

My chief literary influences have been Paul Laurence Dunbar, Carl Sandburg, and Walt Whitman. My favorite public figures include Jimmy Durante, Marlene Dietrich, Mary McLeod Bethune, Mrs. Franklin D. Roosevelt, Marian Anderson, and Henry Armstrong.

Yes, I do write poetry. It's very therapeutic. I'm influenced by Pablo Neruda and Gulzar Saab. It's all very personal.

And me I'm in my bedroom drawing in my notebook Because my hand thinks I'm an artist But my heart knows I'm a poet It's just words they mean so little to me.

I also became a poet, and for one year lived in a Paradise of my own creation; I imagined that I also might obtain a niche in the temple where the names of Homer and Shakespeare are consecrated.

Just now I've taen the fit o' rhyme / My barmie noddle's working prime.

Poetry is creative expression; Prose is constructive expression... by creative I mean original. In Poetry the words are born or reborn in the act of thinking... There is no time interval between the words and the thought when a real poet writes, both of them happen together, and both the thought and the word are Poetry.

There are things which some people never attempt during their whole lives, but one of these is not poetry. Poetry attacks all human beings sooner or later, and, like the measles, is mild or violent according to the age of the sufferer.

The anthology meets with two different kinds of reactions in living poets. They will either write toward the anthology or away from it. Anti-anthology poets often overreach themselves, inflicting protective distortions on their work - as parents in old Central Europe often deliberately maimed their sons to save them from compulsory military service.

If you believe you're a poet, then you're saved.

I do not remember where I read that there are two kinds of poets: the good poets, who at a certain point destroy their bad poems and go off to run guns in Africa, and the bad poets, who publish theirs and keep writing more until they die.

In a word, poetry can not exist without emotion, or, if you will, without a movement of the soul which regulates the words.