Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

Shakespeare said: ‘Men shut their doors against a setting sun.’ Schopenhauer said: ‘To expect a man to retain everything that he has ever read is like expecting him to carry about in his body everything that he has ever eaten.’ Borges said: ‘Every writer creates his own precursors.’ Eliot said: immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.’ Blake said: ‘I cannot think that Real Poets have any competition. None are greatest in the Kingdom of Heaven; it is so in Poetry. ‘ Wallace Stevens said: ‘A poet looks at the world as a man looks at a woman.’ Chekhov said: ‘The crying of a nice child is ugly: so in bad verses you may recognise that the author is a nice man.’ V. S. Pritchett said: ‘It is the role of the poet to look at what is happening in the world and to know that quite other things are happening.’ Stravinsky said: ‘Only God can create.’ Jung said: ‘The creative mind plays with the object it loves.’ Gide said: ‘The most beautiful things are those that madness prompts and reason writes.’ Cocteau said: ‘A true poet does not bother to be poetical. Nor does a nursery gardener scent his roses.’ D. J. Enright said: ‘It takes a sound realist to make a convincing symbolist.’ Flaubert said: ‘Of all lies, art is the least untrue.’ G. K. Chesterton said: ‘Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity.’ Hardy said: ‘If Galileo had said in verse that the world moved, the Inquisition might have let him alone.’ Arnold Bennett said: ‘Good taste is better than bad taste but bad taste is better than no taste at all.’ Hazlitt said: ‘The only impeccable writers are those that never wrote.’ Sacha Guitry said: ‘You can pretend to be serious; you can’t pretend to be witty.’ Jules Renard said: ‘Look for the ridiculous in everything and you will find it.’ Bernard Shaw said: ‘Life does not cease to be funny when people die any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh.’ Mark Twain said: ‘Everything human is pathetic. The secret source of Humour itself is not joy but sorrow. There is no humour in heaven.’ Bishop Berkeley said: ‘Truth is the cry of all, but the game of few.’ Marcus Aurelius said: ‘Soon you will have forgotten the world, and the world will have forgotten you.’ Stanislaw Lec said: ‘Don’t shout for help at night. You may wake your neighbours.’ Dylan Thomas said: ‘Somebody’s boring me ... I think it’s me.’ Yeats said: ‘We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but out of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.’ And Diderot said: ‘What a fine comedy this world would be if one did not play a part in it!’