Javed Akhtar Quotes

Nearly all men and women are poetical, to some extent, but very few can be called poets. There are great poets, small poets, and men and women who make verses. But all are not poets, nor even good versifiers. Poetasters are plentiful, but real poets are rare. Education can not make a poet, though it may polish and develop one.

The idea that a poem was a made thing stayed with me, and I decided then that I wanted to be an artist, not just a diarist. So I put myself through a kind of apprenticeship in writing poetry, and I understood even then that my practice as a poet was deeply related to my reading.

In the world of poetry there are would-be poets, workshop poets, promising poets, lovesick poets, university poets, and a few real poets.

There's not a good poet I know who has not at the beck and call of his memory a vast quantity of poetry that composes his mental library.

You have to be a poet to know how to write a song with lyrics.

All poets write bad poetry. Bad poets publish them, good poets burn them.

Many poets write as if they had been decerebrated, and not simply lobotomized, as a cure for their melancholia.

My dad's a photographer, and my sister is a writer and a poet. My little brother is a mandolin player - he's a bluegrass musician. It's always been a part of the family.

I guess the thing that I'm most proud of is that I kept on writing poetry. I understand that poetry is sort of the source of everything I do. It's the source of my creativity.

We all write poems; it is simply that poets are the ones who write in words.

I've always written poetry and lyrics. My first husband, who was a musician, we wrote a bunch of songs together.

I never think about poetry except when I'm writing it. I mean my poetry.

Of course, I have to consider that I've written a lot of prose, but I do in my heart think of myself as being originally, and still primarily, a poet.

The kind of poet who founds and reconstitutes values is somebody like Yeats or Whitman - these are public value-founders.

Nobody really knows whether they are a poet. I knew I was interested from the age of 15.

There are men who can write poetry, and there are men who can read balance sheets. The men who can read balance sheets cannot write.

Modern poets talk against business, poor things, but all of us write for money. Beginners are subjected to trial by market.

I've written poetry since I was a kid. As the years went on, I got into writing stories and screenplays, but I always, always kept up with poetry as well.

I've written poetry since I was in the first grade, and it wasn't until I was a little bit older that I realized poetry could be put to music and become a song.

I don't know if younger poets read a lot of, you know, the poets - the established poets. There was a lot of pretty boring stuff to sort of put up with and to add to, to make something vital from.

I began the way nearly everybody I ever heard of - I began writing poetry. And I find that to be quite usual with writers, their trying their hand at poetry.

I've always written, all my life, and when I was very young I developed an interest in poetry.

But you'd have a job to find many of my poems which would seem to be very influenced by a particular person.

In 1971, when I was 29, I wrote my first volume of poetry. I am a poet, and I have published four books of my poems.