Jennifer Egan Quotes

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.

There are no poetic ideas; only poetic utterances.

I think fiction goes to poetry for the intensity of its use of language.

Well, I like to write poetry. I'm a published poet.

I did literature at university, so I had a real relationship with poetry, but they don't make many films about the world of a poet.

I sometimes talk about the making of a poem within the poem.

Religious poetry, civic poetry, lyric or dramatic poetry are all categories of man's expression which are valid only if the endorsement of formal content is valid.

If you go into a bar in most places in America and even say the word poetry, you'll probably get beaten up. But poetry is a really strong, beautiful form to me, and a lot of innovation in language comes from poetry.

Every good poet includes a critic, but the reverse is not true.

I studied poetry in college and for a year in an MFA program. As time went on, my poems got more and more complicated. What I was really trying to do was tell stories.

All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling.

I believe that the short story is as different a form from the novel as poetry is, and the best stories seem to me to be perhaps closer in spirit to poetry than to novels.

'Finally' actually started out as a poem. I always wrote poetry, and pretty soon I figured out that if I could write poems, I could write songs.

A poet's work consists less in seeking words for his ideas than in seeking ideas for his words and predominant rhythms.

The things I like to find in a story are punch and poetry.

Poetry is the most concentrated form of literature; it is the most emotionalized and powerful way in which thought can be presented.

Narrative art, the novel, from Murasaki to Proust, has produced great works of poetry.

I think what will happen is that fiction will become more like poetry. As in, the only people who read it will write it.

I intended an Ode, And it turned to a Sonnet.

I liked the kid who wrote me that he had to do a term paper on a modern poet and he was doing me because, though they say you have to read poems twice, he found he could handle mine in one try.

Romantic poetry had its heyday when people like Lord Byron were kicking it large. But you try and make a living as a poet today, and you'll find it's very different!

My father would tell me if I wasn't writing in meter verse, it wasn't poetry.

I love the feeling of creating pictures in someone's mind just by spelling out the right lyrical combination.

Any long work in which poetry is persistent, be it epic or drama or narrative, is really a succession of separate poetic experiences governed into a related whole by an energy distinct from that which evoked them.

In the world of poetry there are would-be poets, workshop poets, promising poets, lovesick poets, university poets, and a few real poets.