Gulzar Quotes

I didn't want to be like Yeats; I wanted to be Yeats.

Music and literature have always and continue to be massive influences. Writers such as Seamus Heaney and Frank McGuinness. I have always admired the humanitarians that I knew growing up in Derry whose influence steered me in the direction of some of the work that I have chosen in the past.

I always turn to Frank O'Hara and David Berman's 'Actual Air,' which came out in 1999. He's a poet I haven't tired of.

Find a poet whose style you like, emulate that style, then deal with things that you know about - don't waste your time looking for your own style.' I wish I could remember who told me that, because I'd like to congraulate him. I've emulated all the old guys - Tennyson, Alexander Pope.

I'm a writer who likes to be influenced.

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 wrote poetry before I wrote songs, and T.S. Eliot was my inspiration. I love his honesty and try to bring that to my own songwriting.

Once in awhile you have a thought, and you rhyme it.

I should be writing a poem every morning but I'm not.

The few bad poems which occasionally are created during abstinence are of no great interest.

But you'd have a job to find many of my poems which would seem to be very influenced by a particular person.

It is a happy thing that there is no royal road to poetry. The world should know by this time that one cannot reach Parnassus except by flying thither.

The poet doesn't invent. He listens.

If you had a million Shakespeares, could they write like a monkey?

I told my wife once, 'I feel like I'm getting paid to sit at the feet of Aristotle.' Some people are like, 'You're comparing David Milch to Aristotle,' and yeah, I am, but I'm not Plato.

If you look at any creative person's work, you can see bits and pieces of their influences. That's what an artist does.

The only thing redeeming about my being born a Bengali is being brought up reading Rabindranath and Saratchandra. Other than that, the stagnancy of this city put me off all along.

People mostly associate Tagore only with Gitanjali. That is the mistake they make. Gitanjali is just one per cent of his oeuvre.

'Finally' actually started out as a poem. I always wrote poetry, and pretty soon I figured out that if I could write poems, I could write songs.

Yes, I do write poetry. It's very therapeutic. I'm influenced by Pablo Neruda and Gulzar Saab. It's all very personal.

When I was a teenager I fell in love with TS Eliot.

When I started to take literature and poetry classes, I just started to get inspired by these new incredible works of art that I had never seen or heard of before. I wrote a lot of bad high-school poetry, just like pretty much everyone did, I think, at some point. For me, the inspiration never really stopped.

They wanted to come in after the pounds", explained Pooh, "so I let them. It's the best way to write poetry, letting things come.

I am a poet who composes what life proses, and who proses what life composes.