Lisel Mueller Quotes

I was in Paris at an English-language bookstore. I picked up a volume of Dickinson's poetry. I came back to my hotel, read 2,000 of her poems and immediately began composing in my head. I wrote down the melodies even before I got to a piano.

I work best in rhyme and meter. I was most confident of myself in that way.

And in a way, that's been a help to me, because I take great passions for a particular poet - sometimes it lasts for many years, sometimes only for a while. This happens to everybody.

I knew what book we had to write, it was clear in my head; it was journals and poetry. So I passed on their offer. I told my agent this is our vision, and no one's done it this way.

I was 15 when I first became deeply touched by the rhythm and structure of words.

I haven't shifted language. I'm writing in English because I like it. I'm a sucker for the language, but the good old poems I'm still writing in Russian.

By the time I was 12, I had memorised hundreds of couplets. I could recite for hours poems written by others. I knew I could write a line in metre. But I never dared to do it till I was 33 years old.

I used to try and concentrate the poem so much that there wasn't a word that wasn't essential. This leads to becoming boring and constipated.

Always be a poet, even in prose.

I write with a Uni-Ball Onyx Micropoint on nine-by-seven bound notebooks made by a Canadian company called Blueline. After I do a few drafts, I type up the poem on a Macintosh G3 and then send it out the door.

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.

Shakespeare was a man who wrote poetry. I'm a man who writes poetry. Why not compare yourself to the best?

For awhile after you quit Keats all other poetry seems to be only whistling or humming.

I would rather write poems than prose, any day, any place. Yet each has its own force.

I started playing guitar when I was 13. I'd written a few songs on the guitar over some time. I'd written a book of poetry, and I got a book of lyrics that I had when I was a kid.

Working with language requires beauty for me.

I'm about 75 pages into a book on poetry. I don't know if anybody wants to read it. It's on any broad variety of subjects. I walk down the street and think of a topic and jot it down and say, 'Okay, that's another one.' They go from the humorous to the serious to every topic imaginable.

When I write a poem, I do not have to worry about using a higher Urdu vocabulary because I know the reader knows Urdu well.

I'm a poet, first and foremost as a writer. That's who I am. That's what I'm most comfortable writing.

Sunday is a likely day to write a poem. Because poetry is a piece of language flying around: you'll find notebooks, something on your phone. It's about finding them and getting them off that crumpled piece of paper and onto my computer.

Most fiction writers are driven to find their own 'voice,' but I am more interested in the voices of others.

I write the occasional poem. I think my dabbling in poetry makes me better at screenplays. Poetry teaches the value of condensing, the importance of talking in a few words.

I always turn to Frank O'Hara and David Berman's 'Actual Air,' which came out in 1999. He's a poet I haven't tired of.

'Finally' actually started out as a poem. I always wrote poetry, and pretty soon I figured out that if I could write poems, I could write songs.

Yes, I do write poetry. It's very therapeutic. I'm influenced by Pablo Neruda and Gulzar Saab. It's all very personal.