Dr. Seuss Quotes

I'm a failed poet. Reading poetry helps me to see the world differently, and I try to infuse my prose with figurative language, which goes against the trend in fiction.

Prose is all about embellishing and describing.

I love to create interesting textures with language. You can do it as long as it seems like a discovery.

Many good poets are really essayists who write very short essays.

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

I like poems that are little games.

But there's nothing that gives me more thrill than when I'm writing and a couplet works. I find the right rhyme, or it's just perfect. There's nothing that exciting.

Don't call my lyrics poetry. It's an insult to real poets.

Poetry surrounds us everywhere, but putting it on paper is, alas, not so easy as looking at it.

I like poems that are complex.

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

I studied poetry in college and for a year in an MFA program. As time went on, my poems got more and more complicated. What I was really trying to do was tell stories.

I wish our clever young poets would remember my homely definitions of prose and poetry; that is, prose = words in their best order; - poetry = the best words in the best order.

I have felt great advances in my poetry, the main one being a growing victory over word nuances and a superfluity of adjectives.

Ray Bradbury taught me the importance of metaphor and simile and poetic style.

I have these rhyme-based ideas because I love Julia Donaldson. 'The Snail and the Whale' is one of the most beautiful poems, and I feel like I could do that.

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.

Literature is the stringing together of pictures in words.

The talent of a true writer and poet is in the ear.

It is still true that it is easier to compose a poem in the form of a manual for adjusting a VCR than it is to write a piece using just tuning as a symphony.

I always liked the magic of poetry but now I'm just starting to see behind the curtain of even the best poets, how they've used, tried and tested craft to create the illusion. Wonderful feeling of exhilaration to finally be there.

When you translate poetry in particular, you're obliged to look at how the writer with whom you're working puts together words, sentences, phrases, the triple tension between the line of verse, the syntax and the sentence.

Poetry consists in a rhyming dictionary and things seen.

Poetry is one of the few nasty childhood habits I've managed to grow out of.

I'm not a 'long writer' and have never wanted to write a novel or even a novella. Poetry, like flash fiction, provides a readily accessible canvas to play with. Whether to express an emotion or share a vignette, these forms are often interchangeable.