Poets Quotes

• Zelda Fitzgerald / Novelist

Nobody has ever measured, not even poets, how much the heart can hold.

• Addison Mizner / Architect

Poets are born, not paid.

• Kevin Young

Not many poets have editors.

• Manisha Koirala / Film Actress

Some directors are like poets.

• Jack Kerouac / Novelist

I know who the great poets are.

• George Henry Lewes / Philosopher

Science is not addressed to poets.

• David Shields / Author

Good poets borrow; great poets steal.

• Grace Paley / Writer

Poets take themselves very seriously.

• Peter Davison

Frost is the most sophisticated of poets.

• Howard Jacobson / Author

Poets are not meant to be in competition.

• T. S. Eliot / Playwright

Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.

• Tahar Ben Jelloun / Writer

There are very few great poets in the world.

• Terrance Hayes / Poet

Poets are like the decathletes of literature.

• Maryanne Wolf

In reading, we are both scientists and poets.

• Mary Maclane / Writer

Of poets I put Virgil first - he was greatest.

• James Broughton / Poet

The American public does not know poets exist.

• Robert Giroux

Many poets, as you know, are not good readers.

• Buzz Aldrin / Astronaut

If you want poets in space, you'll have to wait.

• Jim Jarmusch / Film Director

I think of poets as outlaw visionaries in a way.

• Socrates / Philosopher

The poets are only the interpreters of the Gods.

• John Barton

I feel very connected to poets across the country.

• Malcolm De Chazal / Writer

Women make us poets, children make us philosophers.

• Walt Whitman / Poet

To have great poets, there must be great audiences.

• Allen Ginsberg / Poet

Poets are Damned... but See with the Eyes of Angels.

• Percy Bysshe Shelley / Poet

Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.

• Stan Brakhage / Filmmaker

Novelists and poets have existed side by side forever.

• William Wycherley / Dramatist

Poets, like friends to whom you are in debt, you hate.

• Tom Hodgkinson / Writer

All poets are idlers, even if all idlers are not poets.

• Anne Sexton / Poet

Most poets are mad. It doesn't qualify us for anything.

• Bernie Taupin / Lyricist

Don't call my lyrics poetry. It's an insult to real poets.

• Ruby Dee / Actress

I think the poets and musicians, they belong to everybody.

• Helen Vendler / Poet

There are not many poets whose fame rests on a single work.

• Octavio Paz / Poet

The sound of water is worth more than all the poets' words.

• Jeet Gannguli

I also want to sing the lyrics penned by poets like Srijato.

• Jools Holland / Bandleader

Amy Winehouse and Paul Weller are examples of poets, I think.

• Yevgeny Yevtushenko / Poet

In Russia all tyrants believe poets to be their worst enemies.

• Selenis Leyva

I did sketch comedy with a troupe at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe.

• Edmund Waller / Poet

Poets that lasting marble seek Must come in Latin or in Greek.

• Samuel Beckett / Novelist

Poets are the sense, philosophers the intelligence of humanity.

• Dougray Scott / Actor

It's difficult to get films made, especially films about poets.

• Kenneth Koch / Poet

Maybe there are three or four really good poets in a generation.

• Roy Harper / Singer-Songwriter

I'm an amalgam of the 19th-century romantics and the beat poets.

• Anne Stevenson / Poet

Poets should ignore most criticism and get on with making poetry.

• Federico Fellini / Film Director

Money is everywhere but so is poetry. What we lack are the poets.

• Gilbert K. Chesterton / Writer

The poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.

• Helen Dunmore / Poet

Poets go through a very tough apprenticeship in the use of words.

• Nicholson Baker / Writer

Many good poets are really essayists who write very short essays.

• Hilton Als / Writer

I envy poets because nobody ever asks them if it's true or false.

• Brian Harris

Poets write the words you have heard before but in a new sequence.

• Mandy Harvey

I grew up listening to the 60's and 70's... storytellers and poets.