Jacques Derrida Quotes

I am still interested in the long or serial poem, but have written a few smaller things. I may start sending to journals again in a year or so... that's about it.

I never became a writer for the money. I am a poet first. Even getting published is a miracle for poets.

However, I began to submit poems to British magazines, and some were accepted. It was a great moment to see my first poems published. It felt like entering a tradition.

Careers don't interest me. The only thing that interests me is continuing to be a poet on one level or another, whether acting or writing or directing.

I was pushing for a career in poetry and of course the received wisdom was that you would never make a living at it.

A lot of people feel that the realm of poetry and the realm of the lyric is personal feeling and should rise above politics, which, in fact, good poetry has never done.

This proves that great lyric poetry can die, be reborn, die again, but will always remain one of the most outstanding creations of the human soul.

I'm pretty much all for poetry in public places - poetry on buses, poetry on subways, on billboards, on cereal boxes.

The great poems are not about experience, but are the experience itself, felt in the body.

I am not quite a poet but I am something of the kind.

I didn't start off as a journalist; I started off as a poet. My ambition was to practise poetry. Then I found journalism, but that other voice never fled from me.

Shakespeare was a man who wrote poetry. I'm a man who writes poetry. Why not compare yourself to the best?

At high school, instead of the weekly essay, I would write a poem, and the teacher accepted that. The impulse was one of laziness, I'm certain. Poems were shorter than essays.

The poet is someone, I think, who's interested in registering experience immediately or giving you the sense of immediacy and directness.

I shall, in due time, be a Poet.

I wrote some of the worst poetry west from the Mississippi River, but I wrote. And I finally sometimes got it right.

Rather than numbing or drowning out the difficult-to-describe but urgently sensed feelings that are part of being human, poetry invites us to tease them out, to draw them into language that is rooted in intricate thought and strange impulse.

I always knew that was what I wanted to do - to write, particularly poetry.

I'm not a rock star writing poetry. I don't feel like a rock star and I don't know what one is, actually. I'm a goalie/poet or a hotel guest/poet or a father/poet.

I wanted to be a poet. I wrote from ages 15 to 22, but I left it because I discovered, and fell in love with, cinema.

I had a million jobs before I managed to make a living out of poetry.

I've written poetry most of my life.

At the beginning, there was no chance I'd get published so I thought I'd give it a go live. I had to perform in rock band places and working men's clubs, where you wouldn't expect to find poetry. I ploughed a lonely furrow.

Poets are not meant to be in competition.

Ironically, writing a novel is not a way to sort out your confusion.