Poets don't draw. They unravel their handwriting and then tie it up again, but differently.
-Jean Cocteau
Quotations
Poet
Poets are shameless with their experiences: they exploit them.
-Friedrich Nietzsche
Poets are never unemployed, just unpaid.
-Kathy Skaggs
Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.
-T. S. Eliot
"Dante"
A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.
-W. H. Auden
"The Complete Works of W.H. Auden: Prose: Volume II."
A poet must leave traces of his passage, not proof.
-René Char
All good poems are victories over something.
-Stephen Dunn
A poet's autobiography is his poetry. Anything else is just a footnote.
-Yevgeny Yevtushenko
"The Sole Survivor"
If you know what you are going to write when you're writing a poem, it's going to be average.
-Derek Walcott
A poet is a man who puts up a ladder to a star and climbs it while playing a violin.
-Edmond De Goncourt
