Jeanette Winterson Quotes

Pretty conceptions, fine metaphors, glittering expressions, and something of a neat cast of verse are properly the dress, gems, or loose ornaments of poetry.

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

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

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

Usually a life turned into a poem is misrepresented.

I think I'm a very good reader of poetry, but obviously, like everybody, I have a set of criteria for reading poems, and I'm not shy about presenting them, so if people ask for my critical response to a poem, I tell them what works and why, and what doesn't work and why.

There are no poetic ideas; only poetic utterances.

Whereas if you were writing an op-ed piece or an essay, somebody would be asking, "What's your point?" With poetry you can stay in a moment for as long as you want. Poetry is about metaphor, about a thing standing in for something else. It's the thing that opens out to something else. What that something else is changes for readers. So what's on the page - it falls away.

You can tell it's a poem because it's swimming in a little gel pack of white space. That shows it's a poem.

Poetry has become the higher algebra of metaphors.

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

A poem is a flexible thing, and a poem is a poem.

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

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

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!

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.

Intelligence alone does not get us where we need to go or even necessarily where we want to go. For that, the human creature must exercise harder-won capacities of wisdom, and wise action.

A poem is true if it hangs together. Information points to something else. A poem points to nothing but itself.

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

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

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

It hardly seems worthwhile to point out the shortsightedness of those practitioners who would have us believe that the form of the poem is merely its shape.

I've been blessed with a good head on my shoulders and quite a good ability of discernment. I can see through people.

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