John Updike Quotes

Poetry is something I love to do. Good poetry has an amazing ability to be communicative before it's even understood. I get emotional just from the beauty of words.

My opinion is that a poet should express the emotion of all the ages and the thought of his own.

In poetry, you must love the words, the ideas and the images and rhythms with all your capacity to love anything at all.

I try not to be overly literal. When I'm writing songs, I write down a lot of words, and then I try to simplify it. I like to give people hints or words that make visual pictures for them.

The business of the poet is not to find new emotions, but to use the ordinary ones and, in working them up into poetry, to express feelings which are not in actual emotions at all.

Jigging veins of rhyming mother wits.

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

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

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

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

You go from these high hopes when you're writing to just a desperate want of not making a complete fool of yourself by the end of it.

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.

You know, I can imagine not writing a novel and writing poetry only.

I think poets are much more dramatic, more theatrical than fiction writers.

I want to write poems which are very emotional, but I would have some hesitation in saying I want to write poems which are sentimental.

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

The ability to have somebody read something and see it, or for somebody to paint an entire landscape of visual imagery with just sheets of words - that's magical. That's what I've been trying to strive for - to draw a clear picture, to open up a new dimension.

I was a serious poet for quite a while and had little notebooks filled with poetry.

When I discovered the lyric poem, that advanced not by narrative steps but by blocks and layers of imagery, I said, 'Gee, I probably could do that. So let me try that.'

Poetry is almost like my foundation for everything. I almost feel I am a better actor and writer because of it.

I love reading poetry, and yet, at this point, the thought of writing a poem, to me, is tantamount to figuring out a trigonometry question.

You don't have to be a renowned artist like Q-Tip to try your hand at poetry. You don't need any special equipment - that's the beauty of it.

I get scared of such love where people come out of the theatre and say, 'This is the best work of Anubav Sinha till date.' I feel the pressure and wonder what will I do next.

I think that's what poets try to do: They try to sidestep neurology and go straight to meaning.

I'm a poet.