"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."

Exlpore more Poetry quotes

"I love writing poetry because it's pretty. I love writing pretty."

Richelle E. Goodrich, American Poet

Poetry, Beauty, Inspirational, Truth, Happiness

"A poet is not an inventor. A poet is a player that plays with words on the field of human imagination to excite a reader's mind with the colors of emotion."

Debasish Mridha, American Author

Poetry, Imagination, Words, Emotion

"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

"Amore is loveconfessed to you in haiku.Do you love me too?"

Richelle E. Goodrich, American Poet

Poetry, Love, Inspirational, Happiness, Truth

"The lamp hummed:'Regard the moon,La lune ne garde aucune rancune,She winks a feeble eye,She smiles into corners.She smoothes the hair of the grass.The moon has lost her memory.A washed-out smallpox cracks her face,Her hand twists a paper rose,That smells of dust and old Cologne,She is aloneWith all the old nocturnal smellsThat cross and cross across her brain."The reminiscence comesOf sunless dry geraniumsAnd dust in crevices,Smells of chestnuts in the streets,And female smells in shuttered rooms,And cigarettes in corridorsAnd cocktail smells in bars."

T. S. Eliot, American Poet

Poetry, Moon, Memory, Night, Nostalgia

"Poets are shameless with their experiences: they exploit them."

Friedrich Nietzsche, German Philosopher

Poetry, Experience, Truth, Emotion

"Poetry may make us from time to time a little more aware of the deeper, unnamed feelings which form the substratum of our being, to which we rarely penetrate; for our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves."

T. S. Eliot, American Poet

Poetry, Time, Feelings, Being

"It is strange how a scrap of poetry works in the mind and makes the legs move in time to it along the road."

Virginia Woolf, British Author

Poetry, Movement, Memory, Time

"In a real poem a sound does not swallow a letter, but a letter swallows a sound."

Dejan Stojanovic, Serbian Philosopher

Poetry, Sound, Art, Expression, Creativity

"Sometimes poets expect me to think far deeper than I'm willing to dig."

Richelle E. Goodrich, American Poet

Poetry, Wisdom, Truth, Inspirational, Knowledge

Explore more quotes by Denis Johnson

"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

"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

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

Writing

"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

"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

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

Thought

"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

"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

"I was probably 35 when I wrote the first story. The voice is kind of a mix in that it has a young voice, but it's also someone who's looking back. I like that kind of double vision."

Vision