Age Quote by Linton Kwesi Johnson

As a writer, I was shaped by a desire to write for black people. That things were not being represented. That was my motivating…

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

With me poetry has not been a purpose, but a passion.

— Edgar Allan Poe

I think I had gotten messages really young that poetry wasn't for me, that it was for, basically, some dead white men. My experience…

— Jacqueline Woodson

I always wanted to write poetry, even when I was very young.

— Ama Ata Aidoo

I've always written, all my life, and when I was very young I developed an interest in poetry.

— Jeffery Deaver

I started writing poetry as a teenager in suburban Chicago out of emotional desperation.

— Edward Hirsch

I write for myself and my goal is bringing that world and that experience of black Americans to life on the stage and giving…

— August Wilson

I have to interweave my poetry with purpose. For me, that purpose is to help people, and to shed a light on issues that…

— Amanda Gorman

I write poems to find out why I write them

— Stephen Dobyns

I started writing poetry because language was how I understood the world. It was a paradigm that made everything matter and in forms that…

— Grace Cavalieri

If the motive of writing is for some people a kind of exercise in dirty laundry, that's one thing. I've always thought of my…

— Stephen Dunn

I don't now whether I am a poet or not, but I'm quite sure that I write with the transparency of the soul and…

— Jean-Paul Malfatti