Jeanette Winterson Quotes

I'd advise all you songwriters out there, if you're getting into it for the business, go home and get a job digging ditches or something. Get a life. You'll learn a lot more, and you won't write a lot of rotten poetry.

When you think intensely and beautifully, something happens. That something is called poetry. If you think that way and speak at the same time, poetry gets in your mouth. If people hear you, it gets in their ears. If you think that way and write at the same time, then poetry gets written. But poetry exists in any case. The question is only: are you going to take part, and if so, how?

My 'must-have' was poetry. From the first, life meant that to me. And, fortunately, poetry is not purchasable material, but an atmosphere in which every life may expand. I found it everywhere about me.

Poetry is a sort of truancy, a dream within the dream of life, a wild flower planted among our wheat.

Lizzie Harris's debut collection, Stop Wanting, crafts images and lines of such arresting splendor that I am very often driven to joy at the feats of beauty and healing that language is capable of bringing into being.

The beauty of poetry is that the creation transcends the poet.

My advice to all young people who wish to become poets is: do something easy, like learning how to blow up the world - unless you're not only willing, but glad, to feel and work and fight till you die.

Poetry, therefore, we will call Musical Thought.

Poetry is a natural energy resource of our country.

The best work in literature is always done by those who do not depend on it for their daily bread and the highest form of literature, Poetry, brings no wealth to the singer.

Poetry is a dissociating and anarchic force which through analogy, associations and imagery, thrives on the destruction of known relationships.

If Rilke cut himself shaving, he would bleed poetry.

Poetry is a sleep-maker for that which sits up late in us listening for the footfall of the future on to-day's doorstep.

Disobedience to conscience is voluntary; bad poetry, on the other hand, is usually not made on purpose.

Poetry expands the senses and keeps them in prime condition. It keeps you aware of your nose, your eye, your ear, your tongue, your hand.

The ability to name poetry's gestures and rhetorics isn't required to write or read them, any more than a painter needs to know the physics of color to bring forward a landscape. The eye and hand and ear know what they need to know. Some of us want to know more, because knowing pleases.

O brave poets, keep back nothing; Nor mix falsehood with the whole! Look up Godward! speak the truth in Worthy song from earnest soul! Hold, in high poetic duty, Truest Truth the fairest Beauty.

Poetry is not a civilizer, rather the reverse, for great poetry appeals to the most primitive instincts.

Of all the arts poetry (which owes its origin almost entirely to genius and will least be guided by precept or example) maintains the first rank.

To be an artist is not about fame; it's about art, which is this intangible thing that has got to have lots of integrity, whereas being famous doesn't really take any integrity. But I think you have to admit that you want to be famous, otherwise you can't be an artist. Art and fame together are like a desire to live forever.

I allow no hot-beds in the gardens of Parnassus.

Poems are like dreams: in them you put what you don't know you know.

Poetry is perhaps what teaches us to nurture the charming illusion: how to be reborn out of ourselves over and over again, and use words to construct a better world, a fictitious world that enables us to sign a pact for a permanent and comprehensive peace ... with life.

Poetry is the one thing that isn't contaminated, the one thing that isn't part of the game.

If I knew what I was doing, I'd be doing it right now. I would be the best damn poet, silver words out of my mouth. My words might not be magic, but they cut straight to the truth. So if you need a lover and a friend, baby, I'm in.