My old teacher's definition of poetry is an attemp...

We control the content of our dreams.

Deep feeling doesn't make for good poetry. A way with language would be a bit of help.

There have been two popular subjects for poetry in the last few decades: the Vietnam War and AIDS, about both of which almost all of us have felt deeply.

Every age has its own poetry in every age the circumstances of history choose a nation, a race, a class to take up the torch by creating situations that can be expressed or transcended only through poetry.

At the age when Bengali youth almost inevitably writes poetry, I was listening to European classical music.

In the television age, the key distinction is between the candidate who can speak poetry and the one who can only speak prose.

When superstition is allowed to perform the task of old age in dulling the human temperament, we can say goodbye to all excellence in poetry, in painting, and in music.

I wanted to be a teacher. I love children, so I wanted to deal with children. Then I wanted to be a veterinarian. But by the age of ten or eleven, when I opened my mouth and said, 'Oh, God, what's this?' I kind of knew teaching and being a veterinarian were gonna have to wait.

It is the malady of our age that the young are so busy teaching us that they have no time left to learn.

I basically started playing violin at the age of six. That lasted about three years because my previous teacher died and the second teacher didn't really know how to successfully get me going.

You can get help from teachers, but you are going to have to learn a lot by yourself, sitting alone in a room.