Jason Reynolds Quotes

In terms of smaller changes over time, I think good plays are like poems. Every syllable counts. So I wrestle with word choice, rhythm in final drafts.

To me, a poem that's in rhyme and meter is the difference between watching a film in full color and watching a film in black and white. Not that a few black and white films aren't wonderful. So are certain successful pieces of free verse.

I like poems that are complex.

When you translate poetry in particular, you're obliged to look at how the writer with whom you're working puts together words, sentences, phrases, the triple tension between the line of verse, the syntax and the sentence.

Prose on certain occasions can bear a great deal of poetry; on the other hand, poetry sinks and swoons under a moderate weight of prose.

Fiction and poetry are my first loves, but the really beautiful lyrical essay can do so much that other forms cannot.

In a poem the excitement has to maintain itself. I am governed by the pull of the sentence as the pull of a fabric is governed by gravity.

I have felt great advances in my poetry, the main one being a growing victory over word nuances and a superfluity of adjectives.

Many of today's verses are prose and bad prose.

Prose cannot compete with the economy of poetry, the ability to have a full artistic experience in a short period of time.

Poetry consists in a rhyming dictionary and things seen.

In high school I was very much involved in poetry. You cannot read a poem quickly. There's too much going on there. There are rhythms and alliterations. You have to read poetry slow, slow, slow to absorb it all.

With my fiction, I focused on chapters and overall conceptions, while in poetry, I crawled along in the trenches of each sentence, examining every word for a sign of a deeper significance.

Poetry teaches us music, metaphor, condensation and specificity.

Poetry and lyrics are very similar. Making words bounce off a page.

Poetry is all nouns and verbs.

I like poems that are little games.

I've read some of your modern free verse and wonder who set it free.

Poetry surrounds us everywhere, but putting it on paper is, alas, not so easy as looking at it.

It should here be added that poetry habitually takes the form of verse.

Poetry, as odd as it is, and as hard to figure out as it is, many times, it's almost something that we're used to. It's kind of like a dream language that we had centuries ago, so that when we speak poetically or write a poem about what's going on, a real difficult issue that's facing our communities, people listen.

Emily Dickinson has great sound and sense.

I'm a failed poet. Reading poetry helps me to see the world differently, and I try to infuse my prose with figurative language, which goes against the trend in fiction.

Yet, it is true, poetry is delicious; the best prose is that which is most full of poetry.

Lyrically, the most important thing for me is, how can I tell a cohesive story?