Even if you only want to write science fiction you should also read mysteries poetry mainstream literature history biography philosophy and science.

I guess the two Manifesto Communicating Vessels Mad Love and some of his poetry made a significant mark on me but as far as bringing a literary element into the music I see it as a much broader assimilation.

I'm as much influenced by Joseph Smith and the Mormons as I am more so than by Eliot. Actually I'm much more influenced by the poetry of the Mormons.

I'm quite sure that most writers would sustain real poetry if they could but it takes devotion and talent.

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

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

So I really began as a failed poet - although when I first wanted to be a writer I learned to write prose by reading poetry.

From my music training I knew that some Spanish rhythms apart 5/4 is a time signature used only in the modern era. Holst's Mars from the Planets is 5/4. But if you speak lines of poetry in that pattern you just end up hitting the off-beats. It's only when you add a rest - a sixth beat - that it sounds as it surely should sound.

When I really want to be soothed and reminded of why people bother to fiddle with sentences I often read poetry.

There is an urgent need for Americans to look deeply into themselves and their actions and musical poetry is perhaps the most effective mirror available. Every newspaper headline is a potential song.

I was a visual artist primarily and a writer even from a very young age. I wrote a lot of stories and poetry and... I had a desire to create always. And I always had a desire to show my work.

If you go into a bar in most places in America and even say the word poetry you'll probably get beaten up. But poetry is a really strong beautiful form to me and a lot of innovation in language comes from poetry.

I think it comes from really liking literary forms. Poetry is very beautiful but the space on the page can be as affecting as where the text is. Like when Miles Davis doesn't play it has a poignancy to it.

It is the timber of poetry that wears most surely and there is no timber that has not strong roots among the clay and worms.

I can find some way to make poetry out of my life's experiences.

My obsession with time informs my poetry so completely it is hard for me to summarize it. We want time to pass for new things to happen to us we want to hold on to certain moments we don't want our lives to end.

If poetry alters the way in which the reader views the world then it has had its desired effect.

In the past poetry came in the form of spells and chants used to effect change.

An experienced reader uses the poem as an agent of inquiry. This makes poetry very exciting unstable and interactive.

Poetry seems to have been eliminated as a literary genre and installed instead as a kind of spiritual aerobic exercise - nobody need read it but anybody can do it.

When you translate poetry in particular you're obliged to look at how the writer with whom you're working puts together words sentences phrases the triple tension between the line of verse the syntax and the sentence.

I have experienced healing through other writers' poetry but there's no way I can sit down to write in the hope a poem will have healing potential. If I do I'll write a bad poem.

The music just tends to be a vehicle for that poetry.

Gil Thorpe is a great diversion and is to book writing as poetry is to prose.