Antoine Rivarol Quotes

I liked the kid who wrote me that he had to do a term paper on a modern poet and he was doing me because, though they say you have to read poems twice, he found he could handle mine in one try.

Gregory Corso used to get really pissed when people called Bob Dylan a 'poet.' After writing poetry for a few years, I can understand that.

I'm working now on a collection of Shakespearean sonnets, about 100 of them, that I may publish if anyone's interested. My take on life is a little different from the bard's.

I did literature at university, so I had a real relationship with poetry, but they don't make many films about the world of a poet.

I've read some of your modern free verse and wonder who set it free.

I like poems that are complex.

We recognise in the finished art, which is the result of these conditions, the best words in the best order - poetry; and to put this essential poetry into different classes is impossible.

Poe's saying that a long poem is a sequence of short ones is perfectly just.

Every good poet includes a critic, but the reverse is not true.

The vast majority of free verse is ghastly. Utterly ghastly. No one reads it. No one listens to it.

All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling.

I don't understand why people are going mad about the lyrics I write? Do they expect everyone to become Mirza Ghalib?

The usual bad poem in somebody's Collected Works is a learned, mannered, valued habit, a habit a little more careful than, and little emptier than, brushing one's teeth.

I may turn out an intellectual, but I'll never write anything but mediocre poetry.

No good poem, however confessional it may be, is just a self-expression. Who on earth would claim that the pearl expresses the oyster?

You can't beat a good sonnet, and you can write a sonnet without being married to the damned thing.

In high school, we studied a lot of poetical forms. I was really interested in the math that was involved and the strange live break ups. That gave me a great amount of respect for a rhymed stanza.

I'm sure I've been influenced by every fine writer I've ever read, from Dickens and Austen to Auden and Jane Hirshfield. And also, the short stories of Updike, Cheever, Munro, Alice Adams, and Doris Lessing. And the plays of Oscar Wilde. And paintings by Alice Neel and Matisse.

You perhaps know me as a novelist. Literature is one of the arts - in fact, the noblest of the arts. That is not my opinion; it was first expressed by the ancients. As art, literature has many similarities with the other art forms.

Let me read you some of my poetry. My poetry just takes me to another level.

I don't see that a single line can constitute a stanza, although it can constitute a whole poem.

While I've had a great distaste for what's usually called song in modern poetry or for what's usually called music, I really don't think of speech as so far from song.

I wouldn't be very happy if a poet read what I had written and said, 'What a peculiar thing to say about this work of mine.'

Lawrence Ferlinghetti had a tremendous education as an artist and also an enormous knowledge of literarture.

During the '70s I was interested in words and meaning as a way of making art.