For a long time I thought I was a poet, but that's a high…

I am the poet of the high wire - I never do stunts; I do theatrical performances.

— Philippe Petit

I didn't read poetry seriously until college, when I really began to devour it in a very intense way. I also discovered that a…

— Edward Hirsch

I earn more than I thought I would when I became a poet.

— Anonymous

“You remember I had a strong inclination all my life to be a painter. Under different circumstances I would rather have been a painter…

— William Carlos Williams

For sure I once thought of myself as the poet who would save the ordinary from oblivion.

— Philip Levine

From the throes of inspiration and the eddies of thought the poet may at last be able to arrive at, and convey the right…

— Eyvind Johnson

“The poet is just like the fabled hunter who naps beside a tree, waiting for hares to break their skulls by running headlong into…

— Gu Cheng

What I do say is that I can write verse, and that the writing of verse in strict form is the best possible training…

— Philip Pullman

I had hoped to be a poet, and for a long time I tried to write poetry. My first published pieces were poems.

— Norman Lock

The poet reminds men of their uniqueness and it is not necessary to possess the ultimate definition of this uniqueness. Even to speculate is…

— Norman Cousins

I think that at a certain age, say fifteen or sixteen, poetry is like masturbation. But later in life good poets burn their early…

— Umberto Eco

“Without pain, poetry is not possible.”

— seerat

Some minds corrode and grow inactive under the loss of personal liberty; others grow morbid and irritable; but it is the nature of the…

— Washington Irving

A poet is wounded into speech, and he examines these wounds, meticulously, to discover how to heal them. The bad poet harangues at the…

— Samuel R. Delany

I fell in love with social work, and that was my undoing as a poet.

— Carl Rakosi