Verse Quotes

You can't enjoy light verse with a heavy heart.

Well, it's a badge of honour for any self-respecting poet to be criticized by Auberon Waugh. But in a lot of ways my poems are very conventional, and it's no big deal for me to write a poem in either free verse or strict form; modern poets can, and do, do both.

What I do say is that I can write verse, and that the writing of verse in strict form is the best possible training for writing good prose.

Their free verse was no form at all, yet it made history.

I was born to travel and write verse.

The decision to write in prose instead of poetry is made more by the readers than by writers. Almost no one is interested in reading narrative in verse.

You even called me stupid in your verse, and I'm almost agreeing, for where stupidity is involved, you are quite an expert, friend.

With a lot of songs on this record, one verse doesn't relate to the next verse. I don't think that one day really relates to the next day in life.

The basic line in any good verse is cadenced... building it around the natural breath structures of speech.

Mostly the thought and the verse come inseparably. In my poem Poetics, it's as close as I come to telling how I do it.

All the modern verse plays, they're terrible; they're mostly about the poetry. It's more important that the play is first.

No verse is libre for the man who wants to do a good job.

Sometimes I'll sing the same verse through the entire song, because the other verses aren't clicking. And when they do come to me, I'm in the middle of that same verse!

First, I do not sit down at my desk to put into verse something that is already clear in my mind. If it were clear in my mind, I should have no incentive or need to write about it.

The heroes of our youth grow old - 'the boys of summer in their ruin,' in Dylan Thomas's verse - yet we seem the same.

Do it again on the next verse, and people think you meant it.

Publishing a volume of verse is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo.

Chicago sounds rough to the maker of verse. One comfort we have - Cincinnati sounds worse.

One day, out of irritation, I said, you know all of those years with the Royal Shakespeare Company, all those years of playing kings and princes and speaking black verse, and bestriding the landscape of England was nothing but a preparation for sitting in the captain's chair of the Enterprise.

Statues and pictures and verse may be grand, But they are not the Life for which they stand.

I recorded harp first or singing first. I recorded it all together. Part of the reason is that I don't know how to play the songs without also singing. I forget how they progress. I don't think that any of them are verse, chorus, verse, and so on. They are not simple.

No more pronouncements on lousy verse. No more hidden competition. No more struggling not to be a square.

All which is not prose is verse; and all which is not verse is prose.

A beautiful line of verse has twelve feet, and two wings.

Yes, the work comes out more beautiful from a material that resists the process, verse, marble, onyx, or enamel.

Our job is to make manifest the story, to be it. In a sense, the theatre is such a big star itself, bigger than any Shakespearean actor I could hire, that we should take the opportunity to fill it with voice and verse and movement, not interpretation.

The clear French landscape is as pure as a verse of Racine.

Work in the theater sharpened my verse and my cinema.

I never abandoned either forms or freedom. I imagine that most of what could be called free verse is in my first book. I got through that fairly early.

Write verse, not poetry. The public wants verse. If you have a talent for poetry, then don't by any means mother it, but try your hand at verse.