Books Quote by Gaston Bachelard

One can't write for all readers. A poet cannot write for people who don't like poetry.

— Nathalie Sarraute

The idea of being a writer attracts a good many shiftless people, those who are merely burdened with poetic feelings or afflicted with sensibility.

— Flannery O'Connor

There's always some reason not to be writing and I regret the times I give in to that, because then writing feels strange -…

— Joan Larkin

Becoming the reader is the essence of becoming a writer.

— John O'Hara

If you only write when inspired, you may be a fairly decent poet, but you'll never be a novelist.

— Neil Gaiman

The way to become a poet is to read poetry and to imitate what you read and to read passionately and widely and in…

— Edward Hirsch

Novelists have to love humanity to write anything worthwhile. Poets have to love themselves.

— Marita Golden

“He believes that if talent is demanded of a literary publisher or a writer, it must also be demanded of a reader. Because we…

— Enrique Vila-Matas

Poets are being pursued by the philosophers today, out of the poverty of philosophy. God damn it, you might think a man had no…

— William Carlos Williams

I'm a failed poet. Reading poetry helps me to see the world differently, and I try to infuse my prose with figurative language, which…

— Jesmyn Ward

Reading poetry is an adventure in renewal, a creative act, a perpetual beginning, a rebirth of wonder.

— Edward Hirsch

We read poetry because the poets, like ourselves, have been haunted by the inescapable tyranny of time and death; have suffered the pain of…

— Elizabeth Drew