"One can't write for all readers. A poet cannot write for people who don't like poetry."

Poetry, People

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"One can't write for all readers. A poet cannot write for people who don't like poetry."

Exlpore more Poetry quotes

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

Cormac McCarthy, American Writer

Poetry, Light, Life, Description

"I certainly can't speak for all cultures or all societies, but it's clear that in America, poetry serves a very marginal purpose. It's not part of the cultural mainstream."

Mark Strand, American Poet

Poetry, Purpose, America

"Sweet as the tender fragrance that survives,When martyred flowers breathe out their little lives,Sweet as a song that once consoled our pain,But never will be sung to us again,Is they remembrance. Now the hour of restHath come to thee. Sleep, darling: it is best."

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, American Poet

Poetry, Remembrance, Sadness, Love, Beauty

"Poetry is, first and last, language - the rest is filler."

Mark Strand, American Poet

Poetry, First, Language, Rest

"Poetry: the best words in the best order."

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, English Poet

Poetry, Order, Words

"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

"Poetry is thoughts that breathe, and words that burn."

Thomas Gray, English Poet

Poetry, Thoughts, Words

"With the need for the self in the time of another / I left my seaport grim and dear / knowing good work could be made / in the state governed by both Hope and Despair."

Roman Payne, American Novelist

Poetry, Self, Time, Work, Hope

"There is eloquence in the tonguelesswind, and a melody in the flowing brooks and the rustling of thereeds beside them, which by their inconceivable relation to somethingwithin the soul, awaken the spirits to a dance of breathlessrapture, and bring tears of mysterious tenderness to the eyes, likethe enthusiasm of patriotic success, or the voice of one belovedsinging to you alone."

Percy Bysshe Shelley, English Poet

Poetry, Nature, Beauty, Music, Soul

"There is poetry as soon as we realize that we possess nothing."

John Cage, American Composer

Poetry, Nothing

Explore more quotes by Nathalie Sarraute

"I have often heard that the novel is dead. But I see novels produced, I don't know how many a week, in France. I have the impression it's carrying along quite well."

Impression

"Suspicion is one of the morbid reactions by which an organism defends itself and seeks another equilibrium."

Suspicion

"The novel moves like all the arts. It's transforming itself all the time."

Time

"The reader has to be creative when he's reading. He has to try to make the thing alive. A good reader has to do a certain amount of work when he is reading."

Work

"Television has lifted the manufacture of banality out of the sphere of handicraft and placed it in that of a major industry."

Television

"All psychological research is completely barred by the interpretations of the psychoanalysts. Everything happens in the unconscious, and I don't know what this unconscious is."

Research

"Those who live in a world of human beings can only retrace their steps."

World

"I have never sought the reason why I write."

Reason

"Literature is always trying to show other parts of this immense universe in which we live. It's endless. I'm sure there will be other writers who will discover new worlds."

Literature

"I don't admire Freud as much as some people do. Imagine Shakespeare being aware of the Oedipal complex when he wrote Hamlet. It would have been a disaster."

People