Poetic Writing Quotes

The problem with writing a book in verse is, to be successful, it has to sound like you knocked it off on a rainy Friday afternoon. It has to sound easy. When you can do it, it helps tremendously because it's a thing that forces kids to read on. You have this unconsummated feeling if you stop.

I was once doing a question and answer period with the novelist Jane Smiley in a bookstore and someone asked us what our processes were and Jane said hers and then I said mine and Jane said, "Well, if I had a student like that I'd force him never to write like that again because you could never write a novel in the way that you write poetry."

I think poetry is as old as language, and both come out of the same thing - an effort to try to express something that is inexpressible.

I wrote a poem on my leg once, on the skin.

Songwriting isn't a choice. You're either called upon to bear the burden, or you're not. It's not all fun and games.

If you're gonna use simile, analogy, metaphor, be descriptive and have some flowery adjectives and a few odd nouns and some engaging bits of dialogue or sentiment, then you're sort of writing a novel, really. But rock lyrics are not really known for their sophistication.

Remember picture books are the closest form of writing to a poem. Even though they don't have to rhyme, they must be poetic. They must be written so the worst actress can read with comfort and expression.

Tori Amos had a major influence on how I craft words in a song.

A lot of people talk to me about writing lyrics and it is obvious they are really paying attention to the fact that ours are different from a lot of other bands.

There's nothing mathematical to my writing. It's a feeling.

First of all, I'm not a singer or rapper. I'm an artiste. Besides singing, I produce music, dance, write poetry, and sometimes I paint as well.

Everything I've ever felt, but could never put into words, is poetically orchestrated through Mat Devine 's writing. In a lonely world, a book like this will make you feel like you belong. Simply put, Weird War One changed my life.

In 7th grade, I believe, I wrote my first rap song. It was about everything I was seeing, everything that was going on around me.

I write plays and poetry at the same time, and I'm always refining, but I'm not obsessive about it. It's what I like to do, what I've always wanted to do.

My brother has a tendency to get quite lyrical when he writes music; he gets so romantic, it's borderline. I make it slightly more aggressive. I make the round corner a bit sharper.

When you write a song, it may come from a personal space, but it very seldom actually represents you. It comes out of a sort of mood of melancholy, somehow. It's almost theatrical.

That's why Tennessee Williams was a great writer. Poetically, dramatically, it was fantastic stuff. And with the landscape, the losers in life populating it. His short stories have got rhythm, something musical about them.

His theory was that non-fiction could be as artful as fiction.

Everyone writes in whatever way feels comfortable to them. People write songs because maybe they don't feel so comfortable talking about whatever matters.

The reading of a poem should be an experience. Its writing must be all the more so.

I taught high school English for 24 years. I always teach my students to appreciate the beauty of language and to write poetically.

I would never write realistic prose. I don't like people who try to write in a poetic style, but in the course of their book abandon it for realism, and weave back and forth like drunkards between the surreal and the real.

I would never write a sentence that didn't have a nice rhythm, or at least I wouldn't leave it to be published like that. It seems to me that prose mustn't be prosaic.

Part of what makes for good writing is an ear for what we would call the poetical. Poetry itself is another thing and it seems to me to be the most difficult writing - that those people are the best writers and they lead the way for everyone else and their writing is frighteningly great.

My writing voice is a little quirkier, more singer-songwriter-y than the Top 40 stuff I cover.