Dr. Seuss Quotes

I have a high guilt quotient. A poem can go through as many as 50 or 60 drafts. It can take from a day to two years-or longer.

I like the way words go together and I like the gamesmanship of writing poetry. It is such a challenge.

When I am writing fiction, I believe I am much better organized, more methodical - one has to be when writing a novel. Writing poetry is a state of free float.

Every poem probably has sixty drafts behind it.

There are people who think it's easier to write books in verse, and it's definitely not.

If I'm working on a poem, it's at the forefront of my mind; I'm working on it when I'm cooking dinner or stretched out on the sofa. But if I don't really have it by the 10th draft, I know it just isn't going to jell.

I write slowly, and I write many, many drafts. I probably have to work as hard as anyone, and maybe harder, to finish a poem. I often write a poem over years, because it takes me a long time to figure out what to say and how best to say it.

Writing is immensely difficult. The short forms especially.

The written word is the basic of everything. Most important, the idea, and after that, the dialogue. You can rehash the dialogue as you go along, it 's disgraceful to have to do this, but now and again you have no choice.

I have piles of poetry books in the bathroom, on the stairs, everywhere. The only way to write poetry is to read it.

I can't believe there is a poet who hasn't eagerly put down a word one day, only to erase it the next day deciding it was sheer lunacy. It's part of the process of selection.

In working on a poem, I love to revise. Lots of younger poets don't enjoy this, but in the process of revision I discover things.

All good poetry is forged slowly and patiently, link by link, with sweat and blood and tears.

Seventy percent of what I write, I throw out. I can write very easily, but writing original things is the hard bit.

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.

I was very committed to the process of composing, working at poems, putting things together and taking them apart like some kind of experimental filmmaker.

After you kind of find your footing, sonnets are what comes easiest.

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.

Poems have a different music from ordinary language, and every poem has a different kind of music of necessity, and that's, in a way, the hardest thing about writing poetry is waiting for that music, and sometimes you never know if it's going to come.

I can work on a verse for a very long time before realising it's not any good and then, and only then, can I discard it.

Writing is a struggle no matter what the genre.

I do the same kind of rewriting that I do in the shorts that I do in long books - and that is a lot. The book really comes to life in the rewriting.

I usually do about five drafts per rhyme for each song.

Don't get discouraged because there's a lot of mechanical work to writing. I rewrote the first part of Farewell to Arms at least fifty times.