Peter Davison Quotes

I believe poetry has very little to do with memory.

Poetry is the language we speak in the most terrifying or ecstatic passages of our lives. But the very word poetry scares people. They think of their grade school teachers reciting 'Hiawatha' and they groan.

Nonfiction speaks to the head. Fiction speaks to the heart. Poetry speaks to the soul. It's the essence of beauty. The essence of pain. It pleases the eye and the ear.

That's the miracle of fiction. I use it to spray on certain moments or places from my youth.

Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful.

Poetry is not a matter of feelings, it is a matter of language. It is language which creates feelings.

What has always attracted me in life is poetry. Any genre can have poetry. For me, poetry contains truth.

Poetry is always slightly mysterious, and you wonder what is your relationship to it.

Without poetry, stories would be told in sepia.

I love playing with words and texture.

A novelist can get by on story, but the poet has nothing but the words.

I'm a big fan of lyrics - lyrics are the thing that move me in certain ways.

I love playing with language and the rhythm of language - for some reason, this seems so much easier for me to do when I get to make things up than when writing nonfiction.

Poetry is this gorgeous, complex history rendered in verse and song, a blueprint that can lead you back into the world after you've walked into air.

Poetry is how I feed the soul, and it's how I fire the furnace of writing.

It's always nice to be able to capture your life's experiences in a song and hold the emotion in that way.

I also write poems, so that is something that I really enjoy.

I like rhyme because it is memorable, I like form because having to work to a pattern gives me original ideas.

Poetry is fascinating. As soon as it begins the poetry has changed the thing into something extra, and somehow prose can go over into poetry.

I keep trying to define 'poetry,' but it's so difficult.

Poetry is the art of substantiating shadows, and of lending existence to nothing.

Poetry must have something in it that is barbaric, vast and wild.

When truth has no burning, then it is philosophy, when it gets burning from the heart, it becomes poetry.

Poetry is a sort of homecoming.

I like the machinery of poems, especially when they have human warmth.