Laurence Sterne Quotes

A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.

I read mostly poetry.

I was a serious poet for quite a while and had little notebooks filled with poetry.

Fiction is a house with many stately mansions, but also one in which it is wise, at least sometimes, to swing from the chandeliers.

Many of today's verses are prose and bad prose.

The metaphor is perhaps one of man's most fruitful potentialities. Its efficacy verges on magic, and it seems a tool for creation which God forgot inside one of His creatures when He made him.

Find enough clever things to say, and you're a Prime Minister; write them down and you're a Shakespeare.

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

I am always pleased to be asked to write a poem.

I write quite a lot of sonnets, and I think of them almost as prayers: short and memorable, something you can recite.

All we need to do, reader or writer, from first line to final page, is be as open as a book, and be alive to the life in language - on all its levels.

Poetry is the hardest thing that there is. It fascinates me, so I want to write more of it.

I've always loved rhyming. I love language.

Poetry is the art which is technically within the grasp of everyone: a piece of paper and a pencil and one is ready.

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

Poetry is ordinary language raised to the Nth power. Poetry is boned with ideas, nerved and blooded with emotions, all held together by the delicate, tough skin of words.

The cliche is dead poetry.

I think of myself as a writer as much as I think of myself as a linguist and an academic. I really enjoy writing - playing with language and getting just the right metaphor.

I'm a wizard at poetry.

I think that's what poets try to do: They try to sidestep neurology and go straight to meaning.

I'm a poet.

Poetry is all I write, whether for books or readings or for the National Theatre or for the opera house and concert hall or even for TV.

I'm really into poetry.

The primary pigment of poetry is the IMAGE.

All I can do is turn a phrase until it catches the light.