Quotes About Expression

I have been writing songs and poems since I was a little girl. I started writing short scripts, which evolved into the idea for a book.

I wish I'd been better able to resist the sense of obligation to write some of the poems I did. It's in the nature of commissioned work to be written too much from the side of your mind that knows what it's doing, which dries up the poetry.

I had always written. I had written stories and poems. Then I started writing plays.

I've been writing poems and stories since I was about 13.

I do think that all of us think in poems.

Heartbreak was the impetus to me writing poems and music in the first place.

Artists and writers have to deal with the element that makes the real real and the dream real while you are dreaming it. That's where stories and poems get their power.

I always write stories, and I write poems, too. I just never sell them to anybody, but I write them. They're good, too. They never leave the house. They're too disclosing.

I think I felt at some point that I couldn't understand poetry or that it was beyond me or it didn't speak to my experience. I think that was because I hadn't yet found the right poems to invite me in.

So many poems you go into and come up empty.

All poems say the same thing, and each poem is unique. Each part reproduces the others, and each part is different.

It's difficult to learn poems off by heart that don't rhyme.

I read everything. I'll read a John Grisham novel, I'll sit and read a whole book of poems by Maya Angelou, or I'll just read some Mary Oliver - this is a book that was given to me for Christmas. No particular genre. And I read in French, and I read in German, and I read in English. I love to see how other people use language.

Since the age of 11, I have loved writing poems and fragments from my life.

I had been writing poems and stories since I learned to make letters. I had placed poems in a hardcover anthology at the age of 6. And I knew more big words than anyone else in the 10th grade.

I don't think I've ever written a poem whose intention was just to be funny. I've written poems that start out funny and often shift into something more serious.

I love my funny poems, but I'd rather break your heart. And if I can do both in the same poem, that's the best.

Once your poems are completed, you send them into the world. You don't write for a coterie of other writers - you write for other human beings.

I really just love reading. It's my favorite thing, performing my poems live. Reading by reading, I just kind of follow my nose.

I'm trying to make the poems as musical as I can - from the inception. So that whether they're read on the page, or people read them aloud, or I read them aloud, the musicality will be kind of a given.

My intention is to write poems. That's what I've been doing most of my life.

Poems, novels - these things belong to the nation, to the culture, and the people.

My poems are always about my life in one way or another.

I started to write my own stories, like small novels, and those novels became poems, and after poems, they became lyrics, and song came from that.