Backgrounds Quote by Victoria Chang

If you know much about your work - why you work, how you work, your aims - you are probably not a poet.

— Mary Webb

Being a poet is not a job or a profession but a way of life.

— Kathleen Raine

I've always considered myself a poet in everything that I do, whether it's photography or movie-making.

— Gerard Malanga

I like to think that I'm a sort of poet for our times.

— Carol Ann Duffy

I have never considered myself a poet. I have no interest in poetic artistry.

— Muhammad Iqbal

I don't think that I ever believed that poetry would be a career. I have always thought of poems as something more private than…

— Dana Goodyear

I am not quite a poet but I am something of the kind.

— Edmund Wilson

There'll always be working people in my poems because I grew up with them, and I am a poet of memory.

— Philip Levine

I consider poetry my vocation, not my "career." My career is as a university professor; that's what pays the bills.

— Cate Marvin

I think I view myself primarily as a fiction writer. Poetry is more of a "hobby," a time of rest from the hard work…

— Yuriy Tarnawsky

While I don't satisfy my curiosity about the way I work, I'm terribly curious about the way other poets work. But I would think…

— Thom Gunn

I say sometimes that I'm a poet but I work in the novel form. That's what I do. That's what makes sense to me.…

— Douglas A. Martin