Writing poetry is a state of free float.

The aim of science is to make difficult things understandable in a simpler way; the aim of poetry is to state simple things in…

— Anonymous

Literature is a state of culture, poetry is a state of grace, before and after culture.

— Juan Ramon Jimenez

The brilliant thing about swimming is that, while you're doing it, there's nothing else you could be getting on with, like the ironing or…

— Sophie Hannah

There’s something very freeing about losing the anchors that have always defined you. Frightening, sad, but exhilarating in a poignant way, as well. You’re…

— Deborah Smith

The whole process of having to put the thing into the world seems so antithetical to the act of writing. Poetry is slightly easier,…

— Nick Laird

Gil Thorpe is a great diversion and is to book writing as poetry is to prose.

— Jerry B. Jenkins

Writing is a bit like walking into a big bookstore. It's the bookstore of your brain, and you know you're never going to read…

— Mary Jo Salter

Writing poetry is the hard manual labor of the imagination.

— Ishmael Reed

I would not recommend poetry as a career. In the first place, it's impossible in this time and place - in this culture -…

— Maxine Kumin

I'm finding that writing poetry is strengthening my songwriting, because you're learning to make a piece of writing work on a page with nothing…

— PJ Harvey

The mysterious thing about writing poetry is that when you're - when things are going poorly, when you're not thinking well, even making two…

— Edward Hirsch

Writing poetry is talking to oneself; yet it is a mode of talking to oneself in which the self disappears; and the product's something…

— Richard Wilbur

When I devoted myself to poetry - and poetry is a very serious medium - I don't think the people that knew me as…

— Ana Castillo

Writing poetry is a pleasure,...a pleasure out of hell

— Kenneth Slessor

The writing of poetry is a chancy business, it's currency solitude and loss, its tools coffee and too much wine, its hours midnight, dawn,…

— Keith Miller