Attention Quote by Simin Behbahani

At the beginning of their careers many writers have a need to overwrite. They choose carefully turned-out phrases; they want to impress their readers…

— Jorge Luis Borges

What I search for continuously in my art is adequate language, language I hope can stand beyond any particular occasion. What I'm finding is…

— Adrienne Rich

The more one reads poetry, the less tolerant one becomes of any sort of verbosity, be that in political or philosophical discourse, be that…

— Joseph Brodsky

“I caution against communication because once language exist only to convey information, it is dying. In news articles the relation of the words to…

— Richard Hugo

Poetry is not only the most concise way of conveying the human experience; it also offers the highest possible standards for any linguistic operation.

— Joseph Brodsky

Poetry demands a different material than prose. It uses another facet of the same fact … the spontaneous conformation of language as it is heard.

— William Carlos Williams

More modern poetry is written than read.

— P. J. O'Rourke

So we start with an oversignifying reader. Those texts that appear to reward this reader for this additional investment - text that we find…

— Don Paterson

In general, I would think that at present prose writers are much in advance of the poets. In the old days, I read more…

— William H. Gass

Poets in our civilization, as it exists at present, must be difficult...The poet must become more and more comprehensive, more allusive, more indirect, in…

— T. S. Eliot

Poems' deep work is a matter of language, but also a matter of life. One part of that work is to draw into our…

— Jane Hirshfield

“A writer's style should be direct and personal, his imagery rich and earthy, and his words simple and vigorous. The greatest writers have the…

— Ernest Hemingway