"All the modern verse plays, they're terrible; they're mostly about the poetry. It's more important that the play is first."

Poetry, First, Play

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"All the modern verse plays, they're terrible; they're mostly about the poetry. It's more important that the play is first."

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"For awhile after you quit Keats all other poetry seems to be only whistling or humming."

F. Scott Fitzgerald, American Author

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"I don't think Auden liked my poetry very much, he's very Anglican."

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"When power leads man toward arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations. When power narrows the area of man's concern, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of existence. When power corrupts, poetry cleanses."

John F. Kennedy, American President

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"Poetry should... should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance."

John Keats, English Poet

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"Old wives keep in memory word of things that once were needful for the wise to know."

J. R. R. Tolkien, English Novelist

Poetry, Beauty, Peace, Happiness, Love

"Everything one invents is true, you may be perfectly sure of that. Poetry is as precise as geometry."

Gustave Flaubert, French Novelist

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"Women do not have as great a need for poetry because their own essence is poetry."

Karl Schlegel, German Philosopher

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"And she forgot the stars, the moon, and sun/ And she forgot the blue above the trees,/ And she forgot the dells where waters run,/ And she forgot the chilly autumn breeze;/ She had no knowledge when the day was done,/ And the new morn she saw not: but in peace/ Hung over her sweet basil evermore,/ And moisten'd it with tears unto the core."

John Keats, English Poet

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"From what the moderns want, we must learn what poetry should become; from what the ancients did, what poetry must be."

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"In the grueling light that passed for day..."

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Explore more quotes by Denis Johnson

"I'd met a woman and I got married, but the money ran out right away. I hadn't had a job for seven months, and it just came over me that I was never going to work again. It hit me."

Money

"You're under pressure when you produce facts. You're working with facts in journalism, but you're under all kinds of formal constraints; there are expectations."

Expectation

"I think it's silly for anyone to think you could write under the influence, but if they'd like to think that, I'd like to keep the legend alive. Maybe I was under the influence when I wrote Jesus' Son and I just didn't know it."

Family

"I really enjoy writing novels. It's like the ocean. You can just build a boat and take off."

Writing

"In the plays - that's where I go crazy. But my prose has a much lighter touch; it's not trying to thrill with language, just to be more truthful. I'm not concerned with the accuracy of anything. We don't get to the truth of anything with facts."

Truth

"I didn't finish the stories until we went to the Philippines and I got malaria. I couldn't work and I didn't have any money, but I had seven stories. So I wrote three or four more."

Work

"What's funny about Jesus' Son is that I never even wrote that book, I just wrote it down. I would tell these stories and people would say, You should write these things down."

Fun

"If you take a lie and allow your desire for the truth, you'll end up with some truth - not fact, but something that gets you closer to the truth. That's what we want. When we go to a play, we need to be assured that the experience we're having."

Experience

"When I'm writing for Esquire, my conscious thought is, I'm not writing for American Scholar."

Thought

"If you write fiction, you're by yourself. There are certain advantages to that in that you don't have to explain anything to anybody. But when you get in with others who share the loneliness of the whole enterprise, you're not lonely anymore."

Fiction