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Yes, you can feel very alone as a poet and you sometimes think, is it worth it? Is it worth carrying on? But because there were other poets, you became part of a scene. Even though they were very different writers, it made it easier because you were together.

Roger McGough
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I wish the word whimsical wasn't used now.
Roger McGough
People can put their best poems straight onto the web.
Roger McGough
Yes, you can feel very alone as a poet and you sometimes think, is it worth it? Is it worth carrying on? But because there were other poets, you became part of a scene. Even though they were very different writers, it made it easier because you were together.
Roger McGough
You will put on a dress of guilt and shoes with broken high ideals.
Roger McGough
Whereas with poetry no one has to show anybody really, and you don't have to tell anyone you're doing it.
Roger McGough
If I do a poetry reading I want people to walk out and say they feel better for having been there - not because you've done a comedy performance but because you're talking about your father dying or having young children, things that touch your soul.
Roger McGough
We shouldn't have got married, really. Shouldn't have got married. Too young. Not ready for it.
Roger McGough
If I decide to be indecisive, that's my decision.
Roger McGough
I'm terrified of switching the computer on because there are so many poems.
Roger McGough
I was put off by people at school - my cabbage wasn't as good as other people's, you know, so that put me off.
Roger McGough
Poets are like baseball pitchers. Both have their moments. The intervals are the tough things.
Robert Frost
Poets are all who love, who feel great truths, And tell them; and the truth of truths is love.
Philip James Bailey
Poets lose half the praise they should have got, Could it be known what they discreetly blot.
Edmund Waller
In every age poets and social reformers have tried to stimulate the people of their own time to a nobler life by enchanting stories of the virtues of the heroes of old.
Alfred Marshall
I wonder what all those Chinese poets sound like in Chinese. I like their distilled quality.
Tom Verlaine
There are some fine books and essays about that. Lewis Hyde has written about alcoholism and poets and the role that society gives its writers - encouraging them to die.
Sharon Olds
A Shakespeare could have arisen only on English soil. In the same way, your great dramatists and poets express the nature and essence of the Norwegian people, but they also express that which is universally valid for all mankind.
Gustav Stresemann
Example moves the world more than doctrine. The great exemplars are the poets of action, and it makes little difference whether they be forces for good or forces for evil.
Henry Miller
In working on a poem, I love to revise. Lots of younger poets don't enjoy this, but in the process of revision I discover things.
Rita Dove
Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
The poets are only the interpreters of the Gods.
Socrates
Children can write poetry and then, unless they're poets, they stop when reach puberty.
Dennis Potter
The bicycle, the bicycle surely, should always be the vehicle of novelists and poets.
Christopher Morley
The poets whom I knew then were all men and all seemed dauntingly sure of themselves - although I am sure that really they were as uncertain as I was.
Helen Dunmore
Nations are born in the hearts of poets, they prosper and die in the hands of politicians.
Muhammad Iqbal
People wish to be poets more than they wish to write poetry, and that's a mistake. One should wish to celebrate more than one wishes to be celebrated.
Lucille Clifton
Poets are born, not paid.
Addison Mizner
Inspiration is a farce that poets have invented to give themselves importance.
Jean Anouilh
I'm not, by nature, a collaborator. My biggest influences were people like painters and poets. These are solitary workers.
Robert Wyatt
We have to raise the consciousness; the only way poets can change the world is to raise the consciousness of the general populace.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
At the age of 18 all young poets are sure they will be dead at 21 - of old age.
Marguerite Young
And some poets are far better read off the page because they're very bad speakers. I'm thinking of one in particular whom I won't name, a good poet, and he reads in such a dry, boring way, your eyes start drooping.
Norman MacCaig
Poets, like friends to whom you are in debt, you hate.
William Wycherley
Well, we all start thinking we're going to be Romantic rock stars, but then reality hits and you realize no one reads you but other poets.
George Murray
Poets and heroes are of the same race, the latter do what the former conceive.
Alphonse de Lamartine
As soon as war is declared it will be impossible to hold the poets back. Rhyme is still the most effective drum.
Jean Giraudoux
When critics are waiting to pounce upon poetic style on exactly the same grounds as if it were prose, the poets tremble.
John C. Ransom
And if we must educate our poets and artists in science, we must educate our masters, labour and capital, in art.
John B. S. Haldane
But are not the dreams of poets and the tales of travellers notoriously false?
H. P. Lovecraft
But the West did not last long enough. Its folk myths and heroes became stage properties of Hollywood before the poets had begun to get to work on them.
Christopher Dawson
I think one ages and one dates. I tend to have a good deal of difficulty in liking some of the new poets.
James Laughlin
Many poets write books. They'll tell you: Well, I've got my next book, but there are two poems I need to write, one about x, one about y. This is a wonder to me.
Sharon Olds
I hate the whole race. There is no believing a word they say, your professional poets, I mean there never existed a more worthless set than Byron and his friends for example.
Arthur Wellesley
All kids, when they go to school, are pretty good artists and dancers and singers and poets. All that gets buried, basically through being educated, or brainwashed.
William Wiley
Travelers are like poets. They are mostly an angry race.
Richard Burton
My sisters were going out with artists and poets, and eventually it was the creative world which attracted me.
Luc Ferrari
Living at that pitch, on that edge, is something which many poets engage in to some extent.
Paul Muldoon
I make it clear why I write as I do and why other poets write as they do. After hundreds of experiments I decided to go my own way in style and see what would happen.
Carl Sandburg