Poetry Quotes

Even when poetry has a meaning, as it usually has, it may be inadvisable to draw it out... Perfect understanding will sometimes almost extinguish pleasure.

- A. E. Housman

A script is not a piece of literature it's a process.

- Abel Ferrara

The cloud, for a while more of a metaphor than a giant business, is re-ordering all sorts of industries.

- Adam Lashinsky

Crime fiction, especially noir and hardboiled, is the literature of the proletariat.

- Adrian McKinty

In the non-Greek stories, Persia, Egypt, even China, Central Asia, in oral traditions and written literature, anyone who fights Amazons admires their courage and beauty, and they want to be allies of the Amazon; they don't wanna kill them.

- Adrienne Mayor

The moment of change is the only poem.

- Adrienne Rich

Politicians must be simple and clear about how their ideas will serve the national cause. We can no longer use the complexity of today's problems as an excuse for inaction, rhyme or rhetoric that does not meet the challenges before us.

- Alan Siegel

Science fiction can be very relevant, could be good literature.

- Alastair Reynolds

Every man's memory is his private literature.

- Aldous Huxley

I wouldn't say I'm a very controlling person. For instance, when I talk to the actors, I don't tell them exactly what I want because I want them to surprise me. I even encourage them to change some of the verses of the script if they need to.

- Alejandro Amenabar

In Bosnian, there's no distinction in literature between fiction and nonfiction; there's no word describing that.

- Aleksandar Hemon

Literature becomes the living memory of a nation.

- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Each memorable verse of a true poet has two or three times the written content.

- Alfred de Musset

It is in literature that the concrete outlook of humanity receives its expression.

- Alfred North Whitehead

The total absence of humor from the Bible is one of the most singular things in all literature.

- Alfred North Whitehead

I've always believed you go to literature to find the shared human experience, not the categorized human experience.

- Alice McDermott

If people aren't creating literature, there would be nothing for people to criticize.

- Alistair MacLeod

Poetry is the one place where people can speak their original human mind. It is the outlet for people to say in public what is known in private.

- Allen Ginsberg

If you could literally 'rid' yourself of your problems by voicing them, I'd be all for it. But since that isn't so, why not reserve the spoken word for functional interactions and witticisms, if not declarations of love?

- Amity Gaige

I love 19th-century Russian literature, the avant garde, the Soviet period.

- Amor Towles

In science, read by preference the newest works. In literature, read the oldest. The classics are always modern.

- Amy Lowell

I grew up with Bible stories, which are like fairy tales, because my father was a minister. We heard verses and prayers every day. I liked the gorier Bible stories. I did have a book of Chinese fairy tales. All the people except the elders looked like Italians. But we were not a family that had fiction books.

- Amy Tan

'Therefore' is a word the poet must not know.

- Andre Gide

In literature as in love, we are astonished at what is chosen by others.

- Andre Maurois

My favorite literature to read is fairly dry history. I like the framework, and my imagination can do the rest.

- Andrew Bird

Literature births activists.

- Angie Thomas

Literature plays a huge role in examining difficult real-life issues.

- Angie Thomas

Each person has a literature inside them.

- Anna Deavere Smith

For me, literature is a way of enlarging myself by learning about people who are not like me.

- Anne Fadiman

A poem might be defined as thinking about feelings - about human feelings and frailties.

- Anne Stevenson

I like rhyme because it is memorable, I like form because having to work to a pattern gives me original ideas.

- Anne Stevenson

Each word bears its weight, so you have to read my poems quite slowly.

- Anne Stevenson

I call what I do 'modal structures.' Sometimes they're songs, sometimes they're longer, sometimes they're this mantra - I've never called myself a spoken word poet.

- Anne Waldman

We will have a total chaos without books, literature, and library.

- Anne Waldman

Representative institutions are as much a part of the true Briton as his language and his literature.

- Annie Besant

The writer studies literature, not the world. He is careful of what he reads, for that is what he will write.

- Annie Dillard

The writer studies literature, not the world.

- Annie Dillard

Science and literature are both ways to ask questions about why we're here.

- Anthony Doerr

It is, of course, traditional in children's literature to get rid of the parents.

- Anthony Horowitz

We must wash literature off ourselves. We want to be men above all, to be human.

- Antonin Artaud

Literature for me isn't a workaday job, but something which involves desires, dreams and fantasy.

- Antonio Tabucchi

Poetry is finer and more philosophical than history; for poetry expresses the universal, and history only the particular.

- Aristotle

Literature is air, and I'm suffocating in mediocrity.

- Armand Assante

There's no rhyme or reason to how I dress.

- Ashley Madekwe

Poetry is not only dream and vision; it is the skeleton architecture of our lives. It lays the foundations for a future of change, a bridge across our fears of what has never been before.

- Audre Lorde

Literature is the immortality of speech.

- August Wilhelm von Schlegel

The best work of literature to represent the American Dream is 'The Great Gatsby' by F. Scott Fitzgerald. It shows us how dreaming can be tainted by reality, and that if you don't compromise, you may suffer.

- Azar Nafisi

My passion has always been books and literature, and teaching.

- Azar Nafisi

All through my life, I was hated on. When I was in middle school, they used to write in my rhyme book, 'You suck' or 'This sucks.'

- B.o.B

When you kill somebody in the movies, it matters, whereas in literature it can be allegorical.

- Barbet Schroeder

You know, the music business is like the Lotto. Just put your numbers down and sometimes they hit, and sometimes they don't. There's just no rhyme or reason.

- Barry McGuire

I went to London because, for me, it was the home of literature. I went there because of Dickens and Shakespeare.

- Ben Okri

I did not discover literature of any kind until I was about eleven, or ten.

- Ben Peek

There are vogues and fashions in jurisprudence as in literature and art and dress.

- Benjamin N. Cardozo

I don't really have a lot of hobbies. I listen to a lot of spoken word. I get books on tape.

- Benny Green

I grew up in an non-athletic family, where my parents were interested in music, in literature, in education and art.

- Bill Walton

More than art, more than literature, music is universally accessible.

- Billy Joel

I consider myself a poet first and a musician second. I live like a poet and I'll die like a poet.

- Bob Dylan

It's not easy to define poetry.

- Bob Dylan

The pictures are created by the listener, with a little help from the broadcaster. The pictures are perfect. If you're showing pictures, different things in that picture can distract from the spoken word.

- Bob Edwards

I like a very dark house, just black. I sit there and just think. Once I'm still and quiet inside, I'll begin. It's very personal; it has to be. One song may be Bach, the next blues, a song from TV, or a nursery rhyme or jazz piece.

- Bobby McFerrin

Literature is the art of discovering something extraordinary about ordinary people, and saying with ordinary words something extraordinary.

- Boris Pasternak

Bobby Fischer has an enormous knowledge of chess and his familiarity with the chess literature of the USSR is immense.

- Boris Spassky

I wrote my own verses. Anything I did, I wrote myself.

- Brandy Norwood

Is it spoken word? Kinda, but that's a weird area. Is it comedy? Well, it's funny but no, it's not comedy.

- Bruce McCulloch

The only thing I can say that is wonderful about my mother is she forced me to learn three verses of the Bible every day of my life, and I've read the Bible now five times and it taught me the English language.

- Bryce Courtenay

Literature is the denunciation of the times in which one lives.

- Camilo Jose Cela

Poetry is the opening and closing of a door, leaving those who look through to guess about what is seen during the moment.

- Carl Sandburg

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.

- Carl Sandburg

Poetry is the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits.

- Carl Sandburg

Poetry is necessary, but is the poet?

- Carlos Drummond de Andrade

I am a literary animal. For me, everything ends in literature.

- Carlos Fuentes

Shirley Jackson's writings are a must for aficionados of the gothic and of good literature.

- Carlos Ruiz Zafon

I still read Donne, particularly his love poems.

- Carol Ann Duffy

Poetry and prayer are very similar.

- Carol Ann Duffy

I hope someday to see California literature become a part of mainstream American literature, and I hope to be part of that process.

- Carolyn See

It's hard to write a song about reality because reality doesn't rhyme.

- CeeLo Green

There's certainly a large literature around baseball in the U.S.

- Chad Harbach

In literature as in ethics, there is danger, as well as glory, in being subtle. Aristocracy isolates us.

- Charles Baudelaire

Any healthy man can go without food for two days - but not without poetry.

- Charles Baudelaire

Always be a poet, even in prose.

- Charles Baudelaire

Those who have been writing literature have not been writing life.

- Charles Bukowski

The literature of the inner life is very largely a record of struggle with the inordinate passions of the social self.

- Charles Horton Cooley

All great works of literature either dissolve a genre or invent one.

- Charles J. Shields

You don't help people in your poems. I've been trying to help people all my life - that's my trouble.

- Charles Olson

Wanted: a needle swift enough to sew this poem into a blanket.

- Charles Simic

Poetry is an orphan of silence. The words never quite equal the experience behind them.

- Charles Simic

Why should poetry have to make sense?

- Charlie Chaplin

Exciting literature after supper is not the best digestive.

- Charlotte Perkins Gilman

If it is good literature, the reader and the writer will connect. It's inevitable.

- Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

To me, characters are at the heart of great literature.

- Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

One of the epiphanies I had was that I got into publishing because I love literature.

- Chris Pavone

Istanbul is inspiring because it has its own code of architecture, literature, poetry, music.

- Christian Louboutin

Literature, not scripture, sustains the mind and - since there is no other metaphor - also the soul.

- Christopher Hitchens

I think of myself as a Russophile. I speak the language and studied the nation's literature and history in college.

- Chrystia Freeland

Our points of reference in America aren't steeped in literature; they're steeped in that five minutes between commercials.

- Clarke Peters

The power of literature does not lie in resonance with the particular but the way that the particular speaks to a broader, more universal truth.

- Clint Smith

I want it to be easy to read. I'm not writing exotic literature.

- Clive Cussler

I'm not a great writer of literature. I'm an entertainer.

- Clive Cussler

My favorite rhymes are sort of half-rhymes where you might just get the vowel sound the same, but it's not really a true rhyme. That gives you far more flexibility to capture the feeling you're trying to express. But sometimes it's best not to have any rhyme.

- Conor Oberst

With certain rapturous exceptions, literature is the moral life.

- Cynthia Ozick

Literature is for the sake of humanity.

- Cynthia Ozick

Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice; journalism what will be grasped at once.

- Cyril Connolly

Literature is a toil and a snare, a curse that bites deep.

- D. H. Lawrence

Literature at its fullest takes human nature as its theme. That's the kind of writing that interests me.

- Damon Galgut

Beta males and females historically fare poorly in anchor positions, and whoever has the dominate, or more alpha, personality will always win out in spoken word count simply because they don't wait for an opening.

- Dana Loesch

Children in schools need to have something to do with music and learn it the way they do literature, geography and biology.

- Daniel Barenboim

The force of the advertising word and image dwarfs the power of other literature in the 20th century.

- Daniel J. Boorstin

I studied literature design and fashion design.

- Danielle Steel

I'm an idiot who won the Literature Nobel Prize.

- Dario Fo

A theatre, a literature, an artistic expression that does not speak for its own time has no relevance.

- Dario Fo

I like structuring verses, choruses, but sometimes the verses might be a tango and the choruses might be death metal.

- Daron Malakian

The Profit and Loss Statement tells you a lot about how your business is doing. It can also help you to determine ways that you can go about saving money so that you get to bring more money home! Basically, the P&L statement measures all of your income sources verses all your business expenses for any given period of time.

- Darren L Johnson

I've always been a spontaneous singer. And all the stuff that you hear on the end of the songs, what they call the ad libs - that just comes out of my head. That's not thought out at all. I have the verses and the choruses, and then after that it's total improvisation.

- Daryl Hall

I've been as bad an influence on American literature as anyone I can think of.

- Dashiell Hammett

One of my earliest memories... I knew three full verses of the Star Spangled Banner when I was seven or eight years old. And one of the nuns discovered this phenomenon and I was actually sent around from classroom to classroom to do the whole thing.

- Dave Van Ronk

The book of the Psalms, which is the primary devotional literature of the whole Bible, is full of complaints.

- David Augsburger

If you cannot be a poet, be the poem.

- David Carradine

As an undergraduate I majored in British and American literature at Rice University.

- David Eagleman

I'm never going to be in danger of getting the Nobel Prize for literature.

- David Eddings

I have a slightly bad back, which has made an enormous contribution to American literature.

- David Eddings

The turnaround is when you have a solo in betwixt the verses. You stoppin' to have a solo.

- David Edwards

What's a good metaphor for a Harvard student? A talking, gold-plated pile of manure, wearing a fleece.

- David Fahrenthold

Literature is mostly about having sex and not much about having children. Life is the other way round.

- David Lodge

Literature matters so much to me I can hardly stand it.

- David Shields

It's useless to try and make rhyme or reason of it, because one guy thinks one thing and the other guy sees a whole other thing. So I try not to take them too seriously. Lately I have them screened so I only read the positive ones.

- David Zucker

The world of scholarship is much more measured in its appreciation and also its criticism than the world of popular literature.

- Deborah Harkness

Culture - art, music, literature - is the long game, because it's the way to change people's ideas in a more personal way.

- Dee Rees

I saw I could rhyme words. It came simply to me. But I wrote some pretty horrible songs that I still have on tape.

- Del Shannon

All literature is an effort at the formal character of the epigram.

- Delmore Schwartz

Making poetry with a camera - that's the essence of what I do.

- Denis Villeneuve

Poetry is plucking at the heartstrings, and making music with them.

- Dennis Gabor

The strangest thing that human speech and human writing can do is create a metaphor. That is an amazing leap, is it not?

- Dennis Potter

Metaphor is embodied in language.

- Dennis Potter

Where I come from, we sing poetry.

- Derek Walcott

Maud Gonne was - excuse me, Maud Gonne was central to the Gaelic literature revival. She wrote plays, and she sang.

- Derrick Jensen

My mother was always fascinated with the fact that I could rhyme so much stuff.

- Dolly Parton

Publishing a volume of verse is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo.

- Don Marquis

There was a time when young people respected learning and literature and now they don't.

- Doris Lessing

Literature is analysis after the event.

- Doris Lessing

A rhyme doesn't make a song.

- Dorothy Fields

A poem can have an impact, but you can't expect an audience to understand all the nuances.

- Douglas Dunn

I think the great artists, especially in literature, have always thought with the heart.

- Douglas Sirk

I'm a terrible punster. And I love to rhyme. I just can't help myself.

- Duane Michals

I don't know which is more discouraging, literature or chickens.

- E. B. White

It seems to me that in literature, books have always been answers to other books.

- E. L. Doctorow

Reverence is fatal to literature.

- E. M. Forster

A poem is true if it hangs together. Information points to something else. A poem points to nothing but itself.

- E. M. Forster

What is wonderful about great literature is that it transforms the man who reads it towards the condition of the man who wrote.

- E. M. Forster

I would define, in brief, the poetry of words as the rhythmical creation of Beauty.

- Edgar Allan Poe

Poetry is the deification of reality.

- Edith Sitwell

Perhaps no other body of literature is as subject to political pressures from within the community as gay fiction.

- Edmund White

I've written so many verses and keep on writing so many more that I became afraid that if I didn't write them into one big book, I might forget some of them.

- Edna St. Vincent Millay

In science, read, by preference, the newest works; in literature, the oldest. The classic literature is always modern.

- Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton

Poetry is a vocation. It is not a career but a calling.

- Edward Hirsch

I'm so happy to be an advocate for poetry.

- Edward Hirsch

As long as there's been poetry, there have been lamentations.

- Edward Hirsch

Living in literature and love is the best thing there is. You're always home.

- Eileen Myles

The Gospel of Judas is a kind of protest literature. It's challenging leaders of the church.

- Elaine Pagels

Margaret Atwood was the author who took me out of children's literature and guided me towards adult literature.

- Eleanor Catton

When I write, I have always tried to be on the side of the weak. The side of the powerful is not literature's side.

- Elfriede Jelinek

The dominant question for us with regard to literature has become, 'What does this have to do with me, with life as I know it?' That's the question answered by all these books about how Proust was actually a neuroscientist or how Proust can teach you emotional intelligence.

- Elif Batuman

There's definitely a culture of Russian literature in Turkey. And in the U.S. too, to an extent - especially Dostoevsky.

- Elif Batuman

I find something very appealing about taking literature very literally.

- Elif Batuman

Russian literature got me interested in what literature means.

- Elif Batuman

The test of literature is, I suppose, whether we ourselves live more intensely for the reading of it.

- Elizabeth Drew

For me, poetry is always a search for order.

- Elizabeth Jennings

Violence commands both literature and life, and violence is always crude and distorted.

- Ellen Glasgow

If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry.

- Emily Dickinson

As for my stuff, I'm just doing guest verses for other people's records. I try to stay recording, because if I don't, I get rusty.

- Eminem

I don't think I've ever read poetry, ever.

- Eminem

The knowledge of languages was very useful. I have a university degree in foreign languages and literature.

- Emma Bonino

As it was, I realized choosing the study of Chinese literature as my life's work was probably a mistake.

- Eric Allin Cornell

All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.

- Ernest Hemingway

To provoke dreams of terror in the slumber of prosperity has become the moral duty of literature.

- Ernst Fischer

I don't sing melodically. Rhyme pattern is how I sing. I also write like a lyricist or an MC because that's what I was before I was a singer. I just took those elements and put them into music.

- Erykah Badu

Writers of literature make very little money.

- Ethan Canin

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

- Eugenio Montale

If we can't stamp out literature in the country, we can at least stop its being brought in from outside.

- Evelyn Waugh

Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree.

- Ezra Pound

A great age of literature is perhaps always a great age of translations.

- Ezra Pound

If a nation's literature declines, the nation atrophies and decays.

- Ezra Pound

Literature is news that stays news.

- Ezra Pound

Writers are historians, too. It is in literature that the greater truths about a people and their past are found.

- F. Sionil Jose

Money is everywhere but so is poetry. What we lack are the poets.

- Federico Fellini

Even writing verses from my first album, there were songs that I didn't use because I just felt that they weren't really for me. But I think that happens naturally when you write songs. You're in a different mood in every session. There's so many songs out there that could potentially be used by other artists.

- Fleur East

I kind of like the idea of creating my own literature within my albums. I definitely thought about that when I started writing songs.

- Frankie Cosmos

To declaim freedom verses seems like a poem within a poem; freedom requires guns, it requires arms, but no feet.

- Franz Grillparzer

Prose talks and poetry sings.

- Franz Grillparzer

Observing humans and observing oneself yields a clear-minded starting point for literature.

- Gao Xingjian

It's in literature that true life can be found. It's under the mask of fiction that you can tell the truth.

- Gao Xingjian

I love rhymes; I love to write a poem about New York and rhyme 'oysters' with 'The Cloisters.' And 'The lady from Knoxville who bought her brassieres by the boxful.' I just feel a sort of small triumph.

- Garrison Keillor

I hear a little firecracker go off when you come up with a good rhyme.

- Garrison Keillor

I had a major bug for cities and for paintings and literature and all the things I thought went on in cities.

- Garth Risk Hallberg

There's nothing I'd rather do than sort of, you know, sit at my computer and rhyme.

- Gary Ross

That a literature in our time is living is shown in that way that it debates problems.

- Georg Brandes

Only the more rugged mortals should attempt to keep up with current literature.

- George Ade

A losing trade, I assure you, sir: literature is a drug.

- George Borrow

Poetry is a mere drug, Sir.

- George Farquhar

My father was a teacher of the Russian language and literature in high school.

- George Gamow

The object of Literature is to instruct, to animate, or to amuse.

- George Henry Lewes

All good Literature rests primarily on insight.

- George Henry Lewes

Personal experience is the basis of all real Literature.

- George Henry Lewes

Literature is at once the cause and the effect of social progress.

- George Henry Lewes

Literature delivers tidings of the world within and the world without.

- George Henry Lewes

He who draws noble delights from sentiments of poetry is a true poet, though he has never written a line in all his life.

- George Sand

The Bible is literature, not dogma.

- George Santayana

Reality only reveals itself when it is illuminated by a ray of poetry.

- Georges Braque

The cliche is dead poetry.

- Gerald Brenan

Literature - creative literature - unconcerned with sex, is inconceivable.

- Gertrude Stein

Hemingway's remarks are not literature.

- Gertrude Stein

Remarks are not literature.

- Gertrude Stein

All slang is metaphor, and all metaphor is poetry.

- Gilbert K. Chesterton

The poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.

- Gilbert K. Chesterton

Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity.

- Gilbert K. Chesterton

Few of the great works of ancient Greek literature are easy reading.

- Gilbert Murray

Nineteenth-century English literature I know; 19th-century sewage systems, not so much.

- Glen Duncan

What I realized is that my interest in literature has more deeply structured my practice than I thought.

- Glenn Ligon

It is essential to naturalist doctrine that literature, to be good, must, finally, be the author's experience worked out literally.

- Gore Vidal

When the vastness of God meets the restriction of our own humanity, words can't hold it. The best we can do is find the moments that rhyme with this expansive heart of God.

- Greg Boyle

Children's literature is one of my joys, and it's also my mental comfort food.

- Gretchen Rubin

American literature had always considered writing a very serious matter.

- Guillermo Cabrera Infante

Poetry is as precise a thing as geometry.

- Gustave Flaubert

Everything one invents is true, you may be perfectly sure of that. Poetry is as precise as geometry.

- Gustave Flaubert

Poetry is life distilled.

- Gwendolyn Brooks

There is a wonderful Hungarian literature, especially in lyric poetry.

- Gyorgy Ligeti

Some things in literature are inexplicable.

- Halldor Laxness

I have never believed that the critic is the rival of the poet, but I do believe that criticism is a genre of literature or it does not exist.

- Harold Bloom

I have no models in Japanese literature. I created my own style, my own way.

- Haruki Murakami

I think you can find all the elements that you can find in great literature in mundane experiences.

- Harvey Pekar

Literature has its own life, even in a dictatorship like the Soviet Union.

- Heinrich Boll

I intended an Ode, And it turned to a Sonnet.

- Henry Austin Dobson

It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature.

- Henry James

Remember, I have a Ph.D. in English literature.

- Henry Louis Gates

What is not in the open street is false, derived, that is to say, literature.

- Henry Miller

Anything in literature, including memory, is second-hand.

- Herta Muller

I'm tired of love; I'm still more tired of rhyme; but money gives me pleasure all the time.

- Hilaire Belloc

Love is the poetry of the senses.

- Honore de Balzac

The man is either mad, or he is making verses.

- Horace

No poems can please for long or live that are written by water drinkers.

- Horace

Literature is a house with many mansions.

- Howard Jacobson

Everything is allowable in literature, but what is not allowable in criticism is objection on the grounds of probability.

- Howard Jacobson

Once in awhile you have a thought, and you rhyme it.

- Howard Nemerov

A lot happens by accident in poetry.

- Howard Nemerov

It may be said that poems are in one way like icebergs: only about a third of their bulk appears above the surface of the page.

- Howard Nemerov

I sometimes talk about the making of a poem within the poem.

- Howard Nemerov

We're not in love with Literature all the time - especially when you have to teach it every day.

- Howard Nemerov

The great standard of literature as to purity and exactness of style is the Bible.

- Hugh Blair

Gossip is more popular than literature.

- Hugh Leonard

My verses stand gawping a bit. I never get used to this. They've lived here long enough.

- Hugo Claus

My son, O'Shea. He looks like me, and he can rhyme.

- Ice Cube

A good emcee will rhyme a lot of different ways. Don't limit yourself.

- Ice T

I am extremely suspicious of dreams, apparitions and visions, both in literature and in films and plays. Perhaps it's because mental excesses of this sort smack too much of being 'arranged.'

- Ingmar Bergman

Literature could be said to be a sort of disciplined technique for arousing certain emotions.

- Iris Murdoch

It's different in Scotland. People who come to readings are more interested in literature as such, but the readership in general is really quite diverse. It's a cliche, but it's said that people who read my books don't read any other books, and you do get that element.

- Irvine Welsh

And literature frequently rises to heights that make it international.

- Irving Langmuir

Time the great destroyer of other men's happiness, only enlarges the patrimony of literature to its possessor.

- Isaac D'Israeli

Dictatorship and authentic literature are incompatible... The writer is the natural enemy of dictatorship.

- Ismail Kadare

Literature led me to freedom, not the other way round.

- Ismail Kadare

On 'Sid & Nancy,' it was originally this atonal kind of beat that you hear in the verses, like an atonal dance track.

- Isom Innis

Politics is marginal, but literature moves along by indirection.

- Italo Calvino

Good literature can be created only with something that is different from literature.

- Italo Calvino

I don't believe chance can play a role in my literature.

- Italo Calvino

A poet must be a psychologist, but a secret one: he should know and feel the roots of phenomena but present only the phenomena themselves in full bloom or as they fade away.

- Ivan Turgenev

I have the feeling of being a very small item on this planet, and literature enables me to express that.

- J. M. G. Le Clezio

You know, there's an economy in lyric-writing that doesn't afford you, or at least me - I usually start off with nine or 10 verses and then boil it down to two or three that are half the length of the original verses.

- J. Tillman

Poetry seems to sink into us the way prose doesn't. I can still quote verses I learned when I was very young, but I have trouble remembering one line of a novel I just finished reading.

- Jack Prelutsky

Children seem naturally drawn to poetry - it's some combination of the rhyme, rhythm, and the words themselves.

- Jack Prelutsky

The metaphor of Exodus is one that has dogged the Jews from the outset. Their very success attracts resentment.

- Jack Schwartz

I don't think any novelist should be concerned with literature.

- Jacqueline Susann

I love writing for young people. It's the literature that was most important to me, the stories that shaped me and informed my own journey as a writer.

- Jacqueline Woodson

The quietest poetry can be an explosion of joy.

- James Broughton

I want a fever, in poetry: a fever, and tranquillity.

- James Dickey

All of us suffer some injuries from experiences that seem to have no rhyme or reason. We cannot understand or explain them. We may never know why some things happen in this life. The reason for some of our suffering is known only to the Lord.

- James E. Faust

My feeling is that poetry will wither on the vine if you don't regularly come back to the simplest fundamentals of the poem: rhythm, rhyme, simple subjects - love, death, war.

- James Fenton

Generally speaking, rhyme is the marker for the end of a line. The first rhyme-word is like a challenge thrown down, which the poem itself has to respond to.

- James Fenton

The basic rhymes in English are masculine, which is to say that the last syllable of the line is stressed: 'lane' rhymes with 'pain,' but it also rhymes with 'urbane' since the last syllable of 'urbane' is stressed. 'Lane' does not rhyme with 'methane.'

- James Fenton

This is what rhyme does. In a couplet, the first rhyme is like a question to which the second rhyme is an answer. The first rhyme leaves something in the air, some unanswered business. In most quatrains, space is created between the rhyme that poses the question and the rhyme that gives the answer - it is like a pleasure deferred.

- James Fenton

Metaphor creates a kind of conceptual synesthesia, in which we understand one concept in the context of another.

- James Geary

Metaphor is not just the detection of patterns; it is the creation of patterns.

- James Geary

Metaphor lives a secret life all around us. We utter about six metaphors a minute.

- James Geary

Metaphor matters because it creates expectations.

- James Geary

There is no aspect of our experience not molded in some way by metaphor's almost imperceptible touch.

- James Geary

I'm not into high literature, but I think all my books are literate.

- James Herbert

Poetry, even when apparently most fantastic, is always a revolt against artifice, a revolt, in a sense, against actuality.

- James Joyce

Science always uses metaphor.

- James Lovelock

You can't live for literature. You can't live for the job.

- James McBride

In all highly civilised communities Pretence is prominent, and sooner or later invades the regions of Literature.

- James Payn

However, if a poem can be reduced to a prose sentence, there can't be much to it.

- James Schuyler

There are a lot of things about Russian culture, art, music, photography and literature that I'm love with.

- Jamie Hince

Football is very masculine and, to me, a metaphor for war.

- Jane Lynch

A theory of creativity is actually just a metaphor. A pool of ideas, a well of memories, a voice.

- Jane Smiley

As an undergraduate, I had not studied literature - I was a history major.

- Janet Fitch

I am a consummate metaphor addict.

- Jason Reynolds

My father was a Baptist preacher, and he used to read the King James Bible to me every single morning. He made me memorize it and repeat verses at night before I went to sleep.

- Jay Parini

One of the first courses I ever taught at Dartmouth was on the Bible as literature.

- Jay Parini

A true poet does not bother to be poetical. Nor does a nursery gardener scent his roses.

- Jean Cocteau

The poet is a liar who always speaks the truth.

- Jean Cocteau

The greatest masterpiece in literature is only a dictionary out of order.

- Jean Cocteau

The poet doesn't invent. He listens.

- Jean Cocteau

Poetry is indispensable - if I only knew what for.

- Jean Cocteau

As soon as war is declared it will be impossible to hold the poets back. Rhyme is still the most effective drum.

- Jean Giraudoux

If literature isn't everything, it's not worth a single hour of someone's trouble.

- Jean-Paul Sartre

Bob Dole is not a romantic, at least not an immediate one. Bob Dole is not one to waste a lot of time on metaphor.

- Jeanne Marie Laskas

It's a wonderful metaphor, catching a wave, for how you can look at other challenges in your life.

- Jeff Bridges

I'm kind of a reluctant Anglophile. My mother's a children's librarian, and all of the children's literature I read was from her childhood - E. Nesbit and Dickens, which isn't children's literature at all, but I was sort of steeped in English literature. I thought I was of that world.

- Jefferson Mays

The Pulitzer Prize is an idea; it's a vote of confidence. Like literature, it exists purely in the mind.

- Jeffrey Eugenides

It's like dance is a metaphor for going beyond where you think you can go.

- Jennifer Grey

My love of literature goes back to my childhood.

- Jerry Hall

Literature is such a profound and deep way to look into someone else's life, his mind, his hopes and thoughts. Books have opened so many doors for me, taking me to places where my normal life and its finite limits could never have.

- Jhumpa Lahiri

Everything starts with writing. I heard Nikki Giovanni and was blown away. I just thought 'wow'; she was writing from a black girl's perspective, and the imagery was so vivid that I started doing spoken word.

- Jill Scott

I don't rhyme right now, but I may ten years from now.

- Jill Scott

If my poetry aims to achieve anything, it's to deliver people from the limited ways in which they see and feel.

- Jim Morrison

When I was at school, I was terrible at algebra and arithmetic, but I was always the best at English and literature. And acting, of course.

- Joan Collins

In the ongoing celebration that is literature, we are asked to imagine ourselves as other selves, for better or worse.

- Joanna Scott

Ray Bradbury taught me the importance of metaphor and simile and poetic style.

- Joe R. Lansdale

Poetry is the mother-tongue of the human race.

- Johann Georg Hamann

Every spoken word arouses our self-will.

- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

The decline of literature indicates the decline of a nation.

- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Superstition is the poetry of life.

- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Personality is everything in art and poetry.

- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Sometimes poetry is inspired by the conversation entered into by reading other poems.

- John Barton

No poem is easily grasped; so why should any reader expect fast results?

- John Barton

Drawing is a way of coming upon the connection between things, just like metaphor in poetry reconnects what has become separated.

- John Berger

Poetry stands or falls by its music.

- John Burnside

Without the emotion of the beautiful, the sublime, the mysterious, there is no art, no religion, no literature.

- John Burroughs

There is poetry as soon as we realize that we possess nothing.

- John Cage

I have nothing to say, I am saying it, and that is poetry.

- John Cage

I wanted to do 'Manzanar' because I'd never done anything like it before. The spoken word there is between a drama and an essay, and I'd never worked in concert with an orchestra.

- John Cho

You don't have to suffer to be a poet; adolescence is enough suffering for anyone.

- John Ciardi

Poetry lies its way to the truth.

- John Ciardi

He could not die when trees were green, for he loved the time too well.

- John Clare

Dancing is the poetry of the foot.

- John Dryden

When power leads man toward arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations. When power narrows the area of man's concern, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of existence. When power corrupts, poetry cleanses.

- John F. Kennedy

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

- John Fowles

A great memory does not make a mind, any more than a dictionary is a piece of literature.

- John Henry Newman

Film has its own innate poetry.

- John Hillcoat

Film is not literature - the image on screen is the information you get.

- John Hurt

Poetry should surprise by a fine excess and not by singularity, it should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance.

- John Keats

Poetry should... should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance.

- John Keats

Rap and spoken word have reawakened the country to poetry in itself. Texting and Twitter encourage creative uses of casual language, in ways I have celebrated widely. But we've fallen behind on savoring the formal layer of our language.

- John McWhorter

Literature, the most seductive, the most deceiving, the most dangerous of professions.

- John Morley

When I can't talk sense, I talk metaphor.

- John Philpot Curran

Unregulated competition is a naive metaphor for anarchy.

- John Ralston Saul

To see clearly is poetry, prophecy and religion all in one.

- John Ruskin

The study of literature threatens to become a kind of paleontology of failure, and criticism a supercilious psychoanalysis of authors.

- John Updike

Loads of verses don't make it into the finished song.

- Johnny Flynn

All of my education at Harvard, then Oxford, then Paris was in literature - even my thesis was on Shakespeare.

- Jonathan Kozol

Comics? Honestly, that's more a matter of nostalgia for me. I think most of that energy has gone to my love of literature and my love of film.

- Jonathan Lethem

Literature has drawn a funny perimeter that other art forms haven't.

- Jonathan Safran Foer

I find a lot of poetry to be narcissistic.

- Joni Mitchell

I think there's really no rhyme or reason as to what keeps a show on air. Surely it's a numbers game, but some of the best shows get canceled, and some shows where you don't totally understand why they're on the air stay on for 15 or 20 years.

- Jordana Spiro

When I turned 18, my mom, my nana and I all went and had tattoos of our favorite Bible verses put on the inside of our wrists. Mine is 1st Timothy, 4:12.

- Jordin Sparks

In the order of literature, as in others, there is no act that is not the coronation of an infinite series of causes and the source of an infinite series of effects.

- Jorge Luis Borges

The novel is born of disillusionment; the poem, of despair.

- Jose Bergamin

I've always said that music is like literature.

- Jose Carreras

A grain of poetry suffices to season a century.

- Jose Marti

Poetry is adolescence fermented, and thus preserved.

- Jose Ortega y Gasset

Lovers of literature will look for the remains of the golden treasure in that shipwreck on the bottom of the sea of criticism.

- Josef Skvorecky

Bad literature is a form of treason.

- Joseph Brodsky

Literature invents its own rules.

- Joseph Brodsky

The literature from which I come is rather large.

- Joseph Brodsky

God is a metaphor for that which transcends all levels of intellectual thought. It's as simple as that.

- Joseph Campbell

He knew everything about literature except how to enjoy it.

- Joseph Heller

You will find poetry nowhere unless you bring some of it with you.