I wrote poetry before I wrote songs, and T.S. Eliot was my inspiration. I love his honesty and try to bring that to my own songwriting.

The poetry of a people comes from the deep recesses of the unconscious, the irrational and the collective body of our ancestral memories.

I read poetry every day. I look at it as an exercise, a kind of T'ai Chi for writers. It teaches economy of form.

Poetry, I feel, is a tyrannical discipline. You've got to go so far so fast in such a small space; you've got to burn away all the peripherals.

I was always making up rhymes. But I never thought that poetry would become my life.

I really liked 'Blk Girl Art.' It's like a manifesto saying why I create, whether it's poetry or music.

What I wanted to do in rock 'n roll was merge poetry with sonic scapes, and the two people who had contributed so much to that were Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison.

I like the way words go together and I like the gamesmanship of writing poetry. It is such a challenge.

Why do writers, say, give up a job in economics and decide to write poetry? Or, why do they give up a job in a bank and decide to paint, like Krishan Khanna? They want to convey something.

In the Nordic countries, there are hardly any societal problems, but we writers are bloodthirsty people like anyone else, so we have to quench this thirst with literature. If you live in a mafia state with lots of violence on the streets, you tend to write beautiful poetry.

The other side of it is that, despite all that, people reach out to poetry at the key moments in their lives.

A grain of poetry suffices to season a century.

The sort of poetry I seek resides in objects man can't touch.

Thomas Davis was a great man where poetry is concerned, and a better than Thomas Moore. All over Ireland his poetry is, and he would have done other things but that he died young.

If there were no poetry on any day in the world, poetry would be invented that day. For there would be an intolerable hunger.

We are supposed to write poetry to keep the gods alive.

Poetry is adolescence fermented, and thus preserved.

I spent a lot of time being creative as a child - painting, drawing and writing poetry.

Conventional wisdom notwithstanding, there is no reason either in football or in poetry why the two should not meet in a man's life if he has the weight and cares about the words.

I like to write poetry.

Since the printing press came into being, poetry has ceased to be the delight of the whole community of man; it has become the amusement and delight of the few.

Every afternoon, I shut the door of my bedroom to write: Poetry was secret, dangerous, wicked and delicious.

I began the way nearly everybody I ever heard of - I began writing poetry. And I find that to be quite usual with writers, their trying their hand at poetry.

Eloquence is the poetry of prose.