Junot Diaz Quotes

When I was in college, I really liked poetry. I don't read much anymore.

In Australia, not reading poetry is the national pastime.

I'm reading a lot of poetry because it's a lot easier to dip in and dip out when you've got 10 minutes to yourself.

However, poetry does not live solely in books or in school anthologies.

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.

Anticipating that most poetry will be worse than carrying heavy luggage through O'Hare Airport, the public, to its loss, reads very little of it.

I love poetry; it's my primary literary interest, and I suppose the kind of reading you do when you are reading poems - close reading - can carry over into how you read other things.

Well, if this is poetry, I'm certainly never going to write any myself.

I don't think anybody reads a book of poetry front to back. Editors and reviewers only. I don't think anybody else does.

There are no poetic ideas; only poetic utterances.

The commonest error made in relation to poetry is that it consists simply in verse-making. Many confound the casket of meter and rhyme with the jewel of thought which it encloses, and, perhaps, in some instances, after close investigation, they have found the casket empty and turned away with feelings of disappointment and disgust.

When I first started reading poetry, all the poets I read - Edgar Allan Poe, Oliver Wendell Holmes, John Greenleaf Whittier - were rhyme poets. That's what captured me.

I love poetry and I've kept everything I've written.

I'm ashamed to admit that I very seldom read poetry, even though many of my friends are poets.

You cannot lecture on really pure poetry any more than you can talk about the ingredients of pure water-it is adulterated, methylated, sanded poetry that makes the best lectures.

I think poetry should be read very much like prose, except that the line breaks should be acknowledged somehow.

I don't think I've ever read poetry, ever.

However, if a poem can be reduced to a prose sentence, there can't be much to it.

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!

There's a level at which, if you take poetry seriously, the focus it involves... that never goes away.

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

And the second question, can poetry be taught? I didn't think so.

I love Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton. I also love more cerebral poets like H.D. and Emily Dickinson. My parents subscribed to a monthly poetry periodical, and as a teenager I was introduced to Denise Levertov, who was an influence.

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