I'd park myself in the bookstore and read with one eye on everyone coming in. I remember reading a Robert Bly book of poetry.

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

It is a happy thing that there is no royal road to poetry. The world should know by this time that one cannot reach Parnassus except by flying thither.

My favorite subject probably was math. I love math. Figures just intrigue me. I was really good at math. English probably was my worst subject. But I used to write a lot of poetry. I used to write poetry all the time.

I still read Donne, particularly his love poems.

Breathe-in experience, breathe-out poetry.

The sources of poetry are in the spirit seeking completeness.

If there were no poetry on any day in the world, poetry would be invented that day. For there would be an intolerable hunger.

The actual world, not some fantastic structure that has nothing to do with reality, must provide the material for modern poetry.

One characteristic of modern poetry is that arrangement of parts which strikes many people as being violent or obscure.

Local images have one kind of reality. 'U.S. 1' will, I hope, have that kind and another, too. Poetry can extend the document.

Money is like poetry because both involve learning to communicate in a compressed language that packs a lot of meaning and consequence into the minimum semantic space.

Otherwise I don't read much adult poetry at all, because I'm not smart enough and mostly I don't get it.

I look for poetry in English because it's the only language I read.

Frankly, writing poetry for children is plain old fun, and I consider myself blessed to have such a delightful career.

Stylized acting and direction is to realistic acting and direction as poetry is to prose.

Not all poetry wants to be storytelling. And not all storytelling wants to be poetry. But great storytellers and great poets share something in common: They had something to say, and did.

I read poetry every day. I look at it as an exercise, a kind of T'ai Chi for writers. It teaches economy of form.

I'm partial to epic poetry, which might be surprising given that I don't write poetry at all. The combination of rollicking storytelling with musical language seems to me the highest achievement.

Poetry is one of the destinies of speech... One would say that the poetic image, in its newness, opens a future to language.

The great function of poetry is to give back to us the situations of our dreams.

Poetry is that art which selects and arranges the symbols of thought in such a manner as to excite the imagination the most powerfully and delightfully.

I think that one possible definition of our modern culture is that it is one in which nine-tenths of our intellectuals can't read any poetry.

It's just poetry, beauty and love. How hard can that be to act?

In traditional Asian arts, the word and the picture always sit next to each other. I have an aunt, a Chinese brush painter, who told me that when you do a Chinese brush painting, you have to pair the image up with some poetry.

People compose poetry, novels, sitcoms - for love.

I don't write poetry and then strum some chords and then fit the words on top of the chords.

I used to write sonnets and various things, and moved from there into writing prose, which, incidentally, is a lot more interesting than poetry, including the rhythms of prose.

In Lithuania, I am known as a poet, and they don't care about my cinema. In Europe, they don't know my poetry; in Europe, I am a filmmaker. But here, in the United States, I am only a maverick!

Poetry is the mother-tongue of the human race.

I was quiet, and I was artistic. I liked writing poetry, and that was very strange, so I was bullied a lot.

The poetry I grew up on is really an intense form of poetry; it's so pure and powerful.

I wanted to be a poet. I fell in love with poetry around eight years old, but not through literature. Instead, it came through hip-hop lyrics and my obsession with reading liner notes. Queen Latifah's 'Black Reign' is the album that stands out the most.

Queen Latifah was writing poetry. Maybe Latifah's 'Ladies First' and Angelou's 'Phenomenal Woman' are the same thing, a generation apart.

Poetry has the ability to create entire moments with just a few choice words. The spacing and line breaks create rhythm, a helpful musicality, a natural flow. The separate stanzas aid in perpetuating a kind of incremental reading, one small chunk at a time.

I've been writing since I was sixteen. At first, I wrote mostly short stories and poetry. The first thing I ever had published was a poem about a football game. It was printed in my local newspaper.

I keep trying to define 'poetry,' but it's so difficult.

Pound's translation of Chinese poetry was maybe the most important thing I read. Eliot a little bit later.

If a poem is not memorable, there's probably something wrong. One of the problems of free verse is that much of the free verse poetry is not memorable.

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

Poetry has, in a way, been my bridge to my acting career.

I found poetry at 12 and 13 and, lo and behold, learned that my attorney father had a background in poetry - as he wore dashikis and Afros in the '70s and named his kids Arabic names. He was a poet and a lot like The Last Poets and Gil Scott-Heron and all of these folks. He definitely was an artist.

I was trying to pay the bills with poems, and it was easy to memorize my poems, because I'd be riding my bike in California trying to memorize them before going on stage at a poetry lounge.

That's the thing with me being a former athlete: in the way I attack characters and attack poetry is from the base of being an athlete.

I'm a black Catholic raised in Decatur, Georgia, which was very gang-infested. Then, I went to an all-white private high school and excelled in sports and wrote poetry, then played football at the University of Georgia, minoring in drama.

Poetry is almost like my foundation for everything. I almost feel I am a better actor and writer because of it.

Poetry can't cure cancer, but it can save your life until you die.

I really enjoy English and poetry and writing classes.

The language of the Catholic Church - the liturgy, the prayer, the gospels - was in many ways my first poetry.

I don't think poetry has a readership anywhere, really, that's that big.