Herbert Read Quotes

There is no adequate definition for creative writing, any more than it is possible to describe pain or flavor or color.

It's the combination of the intimate and the public that I find so exciting about being poet laureate.

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

I think people turn to poetry more often than they think they do, or encounter it in more ways than they think that they do. I think we forget the places that we encounter it, say, in songs or in other little bits and pieces of things that we may have remembered from childhood.

I developed a definition - which I think becomes less and less accurate as poetry moves into the world - that poetry was a way of speaking to the world, but fiction was a way to get the world to speak to me.

I've written poetry since I was a kid. As the years went on, I got into writing stories and screenplays, but I always, always kept up with poetry as well.

I like to write poetry.

I've always written, all my life, and when I was very young I developed an interest in poetry.

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.

When it comes to poetry, I think partly the numbers of people attempting to write poems is probably a result or the reaction to technology.

Poetry is a plan for a slit in the face of a bronze fountain goat and the path of fresh drinking water.

I really came to literature through poetry.

Originally, poetry creates the myth, while the prose-writer draws its portrait.

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

There is poetry in fiction. If you cannot see it and feel it when you write, you need to step back and examine what you are doing wrong. If you have not figured out how to write a simple declarative sentence and make it sing with that poetry, you are not yet ready to write an entire book.

For me, poetry is an evasion of the real job of writing prose.

I write poems about relationships, love relationships, and I'm not able to do that all the time. I could go two years without writing poems, and then write a dozen. Having a novel to work on, with the intricate puzzle of character and plot to work out, is satisfying for the time there is no poetry.

Often with good sentiments we produce bad literature.

In the world of words the imagination is one of the forces of nature.

One day while studying a Yeats poem I decided to write poetry the rest of my life. I recognized that a single short poem has room for history, music, psychology, religious thought, mood, occult speculation, character, and events of one's own life. I still feel surprised that such various substances can find shelter and nourishment in a poem. A poem in fact may be a sort of nourishing liquid, such as one uses to keep an amoeba alive. If prepared right, a poem can keep an image or a thought or insights on history or the psyche alive for years, as well as our desires and airy impulses.

Experiments with the "as if" of fiction are often more lively in poetry and criticism and other modes of writing than in weak short stories or novels.

If I begin writing a poem that means I'm intrigued in some way by whatever it's about and that if I'm not trying to find something new and pushing the envelope in the poem I can't expect my reader to be particularly excited about it either.

To write well, to have style ... is to paint. The master faculty of style is therefore the visual memory. If a writer does not see what he describes-countrysides and figures, movements and gestures-how could he have a style, that is originality?

I start writing, pull whatever images happen to occur to me and make up a story, instead of starting with details that are real and I know of and going from there.

Writing should not be routine; writing should actually be the opposite of procedural because otherwise the written word would become a routine word.