Wendy Cope Quotes

Philip Larkin has a tough honesty and sense of humor that I find irresistible, as a contemporary poet.

There's a certain line between jokes and music and poetry that's a bit blurred in my mind.

I've always been a fan of poetry. I grew up with Lawrence Ferlinghetti and the Beat poets. I really followed that stuff for a while. I just love the way people threw words around like they were painting.

I don't think I've ever written a poem whose intention was just to be funny. I've written poems that start out funny and often shift into something more serious.

When I'm writing a lyric, things can only get so serious before they start becoming humorous.

Wit will shine Through the harsh cadence of a rugged line.

Poets deal in writing about feelings and trying to find the language and images for intense feelings.

Chicago sounds rough to the maker of verse. One comfort we have - Cincinnati sounds worse.

I'm a poet, and I spent my life in poetry.

A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.

Poetry is like making a joke. If you get one word wrong at the end of a joke, you've lost the whole thing.

While I was in junior high, I wrote an entire essay in rhyme about manufacturing in New York State. In high school, I won a Scholastic poetry contest.

Clarity, clarity, surely clarity is the most beautiful thing in the world, A limited, limiting clarity I have not and never did have any motive of poetry But to achieve clarity.

Humor writing requires a rhythm and timing, as well as some kind of connection to the reader, and I think that's how I tap into it.

Verse comedy is interesting to me because of the challenge of writing in rhymed couplets, which is not a form that's usually amenable to English, yet to me it gives great possibility for comedy.

At college, I wanted to be a poet. I liked the extremely concentrated language, the atmosphere of otherworldliness.

Poets are seen as the caretakers of language, so working with words no matter what the form is what we do.

An epigram is but a feeble thing - With straw in tail, stuck there by way of sting.

The crown of literature is poetry.

If I write a joke, sometimes people will call it a 'lie,' and I'm fascinated with that.

Humor, for me, is really a gate of departure. It's a way of enticing a reader into a poem so that less funny things can take place later. It really is not an end in itself, but a means to an end.

I am not quite a poet but I am something of the kind.

I regard the writing of humor as a supreme artistic challenge.

I'd love Shakey Bill to tell me a story - I mean, William Shakespeare, he could squeak a nib couldn't he?

I find something funny when it lives on many levels - a level of self-deprecation, of knowledge and heightened reality.