Wallace Stegner Quotes

I guess the thing that I'm most proud of is that I kept on writing poetry. I understand that poetry is sort of the source of everything I do. It's the source of my creativity.

Poets are not meant to be in competition.

The ability to name poetry's gestures and rhetorics isn't required to write or read them, any more than a painter needs to know the physics of color to bring forward a landscape. The eye and hand and ear know what they need to know. Some of us want to know more, because knowing pleases.

I learn life from the poets.

The poet is he who inspires, rather than he who is inspired.

How can I find the words? Poets have taken them all and left me with nothing to say or do" "Except to teach me for the first time what they meant.

Money is everywhere but so is poetry. What we lack are the poets.

Poetry was the first step, and from the age of 18, there was nothing else I wanted to do.

Let me read you some of my poetry. My poetry just takes me to another level.

I once saw a picture in the paper of John Hegley with 'poet' written on his knuckles, and I thought that was pretty cool, so I was quite up front about it.

Translation is an interestingly different way to be involved both with poetry and with the language that I've found myself living in much of the time. I think the two feed each other.

Well, I like to write poetry. I'm a published poet.

The music is the shining path over which the poet travels to bring his song to the world.

I do not go in search of poetry. I wait for poetry to visit me.

And if they haven't got poetry in them, there's nothing you can do that will produce it.

A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.

If you know what you are going to write when you're writing a poem, it's going to be average.

Auden is a poet - no, the poet - of unembarrassed intellect. Ideas are his emotions, emotions are his ideas.

You don't have to suffer to be a poet; adolescence is enough suffering for anyone.

Women who are inclined to write poetry at all are inspired by being mad at something.

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.

Art is everywhere, and everywhere is art.

Translated poetry filled the no-man's-land between my own work and other writers', and I found this fascinating to explore.