Poe's saying that a long poem is a sequence of short ones is perfectly just.

But in the finished art of the song the use of words has no connection with the use of words in poetry.

To know anything of a poet but his poetry is, so far as the poetry is concerned, to know something that may be entertaining, even delightful, but is certainly inessential.

To take an analogy: if we say that a democratic government is the best kind of government, we mean that it most completely fulfills the highest function of a government - the realisation of the will of the people.

Any long work in which poetry is persistent, be it epic or drama or narrative, is really a succession of separate poetic experiences governed into a related whole by an energy distinct from that which evoked them.

Poetry being the sign of that which all men desire, even though the desire be unconscious, intensity of life or completeness of experience, the universality of its appeal is a matter of course.

We recognise in the finished art, which is the result of these conditions, the best words in the best order - poetry; and to put this essential poetry into different classes is impossible.

The poet's perfect expression is the token of a perfect experience; what he says in the best possible way he has felt in the best possible way, that is, completely.

A lyric, it is true, is the expression of personal emotion, but then so is all poetry, and to suppose that there are several kinds of poetry, differing from each other in essence, is to be deceived by wholly artificial divisions which have no real being.

It is commonly asserted and accepted that Paradise Lost is among the two or three greatest English poems; it may justly be taken as the type of supreme poetic achievement in our literature.

The musician - if he be a good one - finds his own perception prompted by the poet's perception, and he translates the expression of that perception from the terms of poetry into the terms of music.

The written word is everything.

Great men are rare, poets are rarer, but the great man who is a poet, transfiguring his greatness, is the rarest of all events.

Poetry is the communication through words of certain experiences that can be communicated in no other way.

When the poet makes his perfect selection of a word, he is endowing the word with life.

So it is in poetry. All we ask is that the mood recorded shall impress us as having been of the kind that exhausts the imaginative capacity; if it fails to do this the failure will announce itself either in prose or in insignificant verse.

It should here be added that poetry habitually takes the form of verse.

If it is an imperfect word, no external circumstance can heighten its value as poetry.

There can be no proof that Blake's lyric is composed of the best words in the best order; only a conviction, accepted by our knowledge and judgment, that it is so.

Poe's saying that a long poem is a sequence of short ones is perfectly just.

For while the subjects of poetry are few and recurrent, the moods of man are infinitely various and unstable. It is the same in all arts.

Almost every wise saying has an opposite one, no less wise, to balance it.

But this is a true saying among men: the gifts of enemies are no gifts and profitless.

I've done a lot of acting. I'm not saying I'm the greatest, but I'd love to act, I'd love to sing.

Let me start by saying, I'm utterly disgusted with the former members of the Dead Kennedys.

That other saying, I'm a part of all that I have met, I think that would have to begin with my wonderful parents back in Atlanta when I was a youngster five years old I was tongue tied.

But clearly at the same time you've got to get out there and connect with voters and actually respond to the needs, the frustrations, whatever problems their now saying are not being adequately solved.

The Kiss scene was attempted three times. The first was in a peculiar spot of the fort on the ground level. It felt forced to me, and I knew right away that, in spite of what others were saying, it was dead wrong.

I am saying pornography hurts anyone who reads it, garbage in, garbage out.

I was in the middle of a crossroads, which is a nice way of saying crisis, physically, emotionally and spiritually. You know the physical part. We just talked about it.

I am a genius. Then it amused me to keep saying so, but now it does not. I expected to be happy sometime. Now I know I shall never be.

A salute from this corner to President Bush for saying he was willing to investigate raising or eliminating the cap on salaries subject to the Social Security tax.

Love in the real world means saying you're sorry 10 times a day.

I had something I was trying to say and sometimes the message is an easy transmission and sometimes it's a difficult one but I love the power of saying it so I'm gonna do it whether it's hard or easy.

And, quite frankly, I fully expected to be charged with murder, because they weren't charging anybody. I did it in terms of, I felt like I was throwing down the gauntlet saying look, this is what happened. There's a family out there that needed to know what happened.

I know I stand visibly onstage, but my function is still unseen, because I rarely see the immediate results of what I am saying or doing or writing.

And before our current legislature adjourns, we intend to become the first state of full and true choice by saying to every low and middle-income Hoosier family, if you think a non-government school is the right one for your child, you're as entitled to that option as any wealthy family; here's a voucher, go sign up.

They give me the money, I give them the book. Having input into the adaptation would be kind of like selling a house and coming back three years later and saying, 'Paint it this color!'

You know it's hard to hear what a bearded man is saying. He can't speak above a whisker.

We had an eyeball-to-eyeball agreement at a restaurant before I came back that, if I came back, he would never talk to me that way again or I was simply saying no.

So, in a way I was hedging and saying that if the Olympic stuff doesn't work out at least I can be a lawyer.

I hadn't even watched '24' before, and the audition was kind of far away. When I got the material, there wasn't a character yet, so it almost seemed like an assistant to Jack Bauer saying, 'Yes, sir. No, sir.'

Music is more emotional than prose, more revolutionary than poetry. I'm not saying I've got the answers, just a of questions that I don't hear other artists asking.

Failure should be our teacher, not our undertaker. Failure is delay, not defeat. It is a temporary detour, not a dead end. Failure is something we can avoid only by saying nothing, doing nothing, and being nothing.

We have an open society. No one will come and take me away for saying what I am saying. But they don't have to, if they can control how many people hear it. And that's how they do it.

I didn't write any music at all, and then, I remember Jon Anderson being very insistent saying that there were two kinds of musicians: the ones who wrote music and the ones who didn't.

I'm just saying that there are high quality materials, and when we change them then there should be a way of changing them so that you can celebrate that change - rather than just 'mix it up'.

I've directed a fair amount of television series - so I'm always trying to learn new things. One episode was all hand-held and I'm trying to get better at when you should do things and when you should just shut up and watch what the people are saying.

The Vietnamese have a secret weapon. It's their willingness to die beyond our willingness to kill. In effect, they've been saying, You can kill us, but you'll have to kill a lot of us; you may have to kill all of us. And, thank heaven, we are not yet ready to do that.