And no one knows, at sight, a masterpiece.
And give up verse, my boy,
There's nothing in it.
Ezra Pound
Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion;
it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality.
But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions
know what it means to want to escape from these things.
T.S. Eliot
Life resembles a novel more, than a novel resembles life.
George Sand
Literature is news that stays news.
Ezra Pound
I cannot think that Real Poets have any competition. None are greatest in the Kingdom of Heaven;
it is so in Poetry.
William Blake
The poet looks at the world as a man looks at a woman.
Wallace Stevens
The poet dreams being awake.
He is not possessed by his subject, but has dominion over it.
Charles Lamb
Poetry heals the wounds inflicted by reason.
Novalis
Real books should be the offspring not of daylight and casual talk, but of darkness and silence.
Marcel Proust
A true poet does not bother to be poetical.
Nor does a nusery gardener scent his roses.
Jean Cocteau
I suspect that the only books that influence us are those for which we are ready,
and which have gone a little further down our particular path
than we have yet gone ourselves.
E.M. Forster
People do not deserve to have good writing, they are so pleased with bad.
Emerson
Then suddenly - WOOMF -
It was the Ro-man-tic Re-viv-al
And it didn't matter how you wrote,
All the public wanted was a hairy great image
Before they'd even print you
You had to smoke opium, die of consumption,
Fall in love with your sister,
Or drown in the Mediterranean (not at Brighton)
My publisher said: "I'll have to remainder you,
Unless you go and live in a lake or something
Like this bloke Wordsworth."
Adrian Mitchell
Modernism in English became the Americanization of Edwardian literature.
Max Saunders
Think you, if Laura had been Petrach's wife
He would have written sonnets all his life?
Lord Byron
Why do the bad writers
win the fight?
Why do good writers
die in need?
Because the writers
who can't write
are read by readers
who can't read.
Piet Hein
It is very, very easy not to be offended by a book.
You just have to shut it.
Salman Rushdie
I am two fooles, I know
For loving, and for saying so
In whining poetry.
John Donne
In poets as true is but rare
True taste as seldom is the critic's share.
Alexander Pope
Prose is when all the lines except the last go on to the end.
Poetry is when some of them fall short of it.
Jeremy Bentham
Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.
T.S. Eliot
Poetry is simply the most beautiful, impressive and widely effective mode
of saying things, and hence its importance.
Matthew Arnold
'Tis strange, but true;
For truth is always stranger than fiction.
Lord Byron
There is a pleasure in poetic pains
which only poets know.
William Cowper
This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly.
It should be thrown at great force.
Dorothy Parker
Whereever they burn books they will also, in the end, burn human beings.
Heinrich Heine
Poets utter great and wise things which they do not themselves understand
Plato
We shouldn't teach great books;
we should teach a love of reading.
B.F. Skinner
TENUI MUSAM MEDITAMUR AVENA
(We cultivate literature upon a little oatmeal)
Sydney Smith
How many a man have dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book.
Thoreau
We do not read and write poetry because it is cute.
We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race.
And the human race is filled with passion.
from Dead Poets' Society
Child, do not throw this book about;
Refrain from the unholy pleasure
Of cutting all the pictures out.
Preserve it as your chiefest treasure.
Hillaire Belloc
I agree with one of your respectable critics
that a taste for drawing-rooms has spoiled more poets
than ever did a taste for gutters.
Thomas Beer
Libraries are not made; they grow.
Augustine Birrell
If I could always read, I should never feel the want of company.
Lord Byron
Not the poem which we have read,
but that to which we return, with the greatest pleasure,
possesses the genuine power, and claims the name of essential poetry
Coleridge
There is a great deal of difference
between the eager man who wants to read a book,
and the tired man who wants a book to read.
G. K. Chesterton
A classic is something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read.
Mark Twain
Genuine poetry is composed and conceived by the soul.
Matthew Arnold
A critic is a bundle of biases held loosely together by a sense of taste.
Whitney Balliett
Literature is a drug.
G. Borrow
With me poetry has not been a purpose but a
passion;
and the passions should be held in reverence:
they must not --
they can not at be will be excited,
with an eye to the paltry compensa tions, or the more
paltry commendations of mankind.
Edgar Allen Poe
What other culture could have produced someone like
Hemingway and not
seen the joke?
Gore Vidal
Donne, for not keeping of accent, deserved hanging.
Ben Jonson
Poetry is not the most important thing in life...
I'd much rather lie in a hot bath reading
Agatha Christie and suck sweets.
Dylan Thomas
Book -- what they make a movie out of for television.
L.L. Levinson
Email: westerm@dorit.ihi.ku.dk
