All good poems are victories over something.

Well, the great thing for me about poetry is that in good poems the dislocation of words, that is to say, the distance between…

— Harry Mathews

Good poems do a lot of things at once. Often, by doing so, they encourage us to acknowledge mixed and incompatible feelings. Good poems,…

— Stephen Burt

It's good to have poems that begin with tea and end with God.

— Robert Bly

... to write well it is entirely necessary to read widely and deeply. Good poems are the best teachers.

— Mary Oliver

“Now listen to me, please: On a winter day, when you were a lycée student, it was snowing, and you were lost in thought.…

— Orhan Pamuk

To write good poems is the secret of brevity.

— Dejan Stojanovic

Existence itself is nothing if not an amazement. Good poems restore amazement.

— Jane Hirshfield

I began to imitate what I was reading, and I started to become a poet, even though what I was writing were not good…

— Edward Hirsch

Good acts are like good poems. One may easily get their drift, but they are not rationally understood.

— Albert Einstein

Good poems ask us to have complex minds and hearts. Even simple-of-surface poems want that. Perhaps those are the ones that want it most…

— Jane Hirshfield

Poverty is very good in poems but very bad in the house; very good in maxims and sermons but very bad in practical life.

— Henry Ward Beecher

A good poem is a tautology. It expands one word by adding a number which clarify it, thus making a new word which has…

— Alasdair Gray

Regardless of one victory, two victories, four victories, there's never been a victory by a cancer survivor. That's a fact that hopefully I'll be…

— Lance Armstrong

Sometimes the greatest victories we can make for mankind are the victories we make over ourselves.

— Wes Fesler

The only victories which leave no regret are those which are gained over ignorance.

— Napoleon Bonaparte