Famous Quotes

"Unfortunately, poetry is not born in noise, in crowds, or on a bus. There have to be four walls and the certainty that the telephone will not ring. That's what writing is all about."

Wislawa Szymborska on Poetry

More quotes about Poetry

• "All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling."

  Oscar Wilde on Poetry

• "A poet can survive everything but a misprint."

  Oscar Wilde on Poetry

• "Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things."

  T. S. Eliot on Poetry

• "Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words."

  Robert Frost on Poetry

• "A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness."

  Robert Frost on Poetry

More quotes by Wislawa Szymborska

• "Let the people who never find true love keep saying that there's no such thing. Their faith will make it easier for them to live and die."

• "All the best have something in common, a regard for reality, an agreement to its primacy over the imagination."

• "Any knowledge that doesn't lead to new questions quickly dies out: it fails to maintain the temperature required for sustaining life."

• "Each of us has a very rich nature and can look at things objectively, from a distance, and at the same time can have something more personal to say about them. I am trying to look at the world, and at myself, from many different points of view. I think many poets have this duality."

• "I cannot imagine any writer who would not fight for his peace and quiet."