Keats quotes:

Send

I want to read Keats and Wordsworth, Hemingway, George Orwell. -- Aravind Adiga
For awhile after you quit Keats all other poetry seems to be only whistling or humming. -- F. Scott Fitzgerald
If you read Keats's poems, they're often full of doubts and anxieties. They can be quite tough. -- Jane Campion
I am a genius who has written poems that will survive with the best of Shakespeare, Wordsworth and Keats. -- Irving Layton
As for how criticism of Keats' poetry relates to criticism of my own work, I'll leave that for others to decide. -- Jane Campion
If people connect me with the Romantics in general, they probably connect me most with Keats. But Wordsworth is the poet I admire above all others. -- Andrew Motion
Do you know what would hold me together on a battlefield? The sense that I was perpetuating the language in which Keats and the rest of them wrote! -- Wilfred Owen
When I read Andrew Motion's biography, I wept. It's something about the purity of the story and how fresh it was because of the love letters Keats wrote. -- Jane Campion
Keats himself spoke about how Shakespeare was capable of erasing himself completely from the characters he had created. As an actor, that is what I'm trying to do. -- Ben Whishaw
Keats writes better about poems than anybody I've ever read. The things that he says about what he wants his own poems to be are the ideals that I share. -- Andrew Motion
We learned in the university to consider Wordsworth and Keats as Romantics. They were only a generation apart, but Wordsworth didn't even read Keats's book when he gave him a copy. -- Thom Gunn
A poem with grandly conceived and executed stanzas, such as one of Keats's odes, should be like an enfilade of rooms in a palace: one proceeds, with eager anticipation, from room to room. -- James Fenton
If you want to study writing, read Dickens. That's how to study writing, or Faulkner, or D.H. Lawrence, or John Keats. They can teach you everything you need to know about writing. -- Shelby Foote
I can get very philosophical and ask the questions Keats was asking as a young guy. What are we here for? What's a soul? What's it all about? What is thinking about, imagination? -- Jane Campion
You know who my gods are, who I believe in fervently? Herman Melville, Emily Dickinson - she's probably the top - Mozart, Shakespeare, Keats. These are wonderful gods who have gotten me through the narrow straits of life. -- Maurice Sendak
I lost many literary battles the day I read 'Their Eyes Were Watching God.' I had to concede that occasionally aphorisms have their power. I had to give up the idea that Keats had a monopoly on the lyrical. -- Zadie Smith
Writers collect stories of rituals: John Cheever putting on a jacket and tie to go down to the basement, where he kept a desk near the boiler room. Keats buttoning up his clean white shirt to write in, after work. -- Mona Simpson
All my early books are written as if I were Indian. In England, I had started writing as if I were English; now I write as if I were American. You take other people's backgrounds and characters; Keats called it negative capability. -- Ruth Prawer Jhabvala
On a summer night it can be lovely to sit around outside with friends after dinner and, yes, read poetry to each other. Keats and Yeats will never let you down, but it's differently exciting to read the work of poets who are still walking around out there. -- Michael Cunningham
Eight years ago, I was drawn into Keats's world by Andrew Motion's biography. Soon I was reading back and forth between Keats's letters and his poems. The letters were fresh, intimate and irreverent, as though he were present and speaking. The Keats spell went very deep for me. -- Jane Campion
I attended school regularly for three years. I learned to read and write. 'Lamb's Tales' from Shakespeare was my favourite reading matter. I stole, by finding, Palgrave's 'Golden Treasury.' These two books, and the 'Everyman' edition of John Keats, were my proudest and dearest possessions, my greatest wealth. -- Peter Abrahams
John Keats / John Keats / John / Please put your scarf on. -- J. D. Salinger
Keats longed for fame, but longed above all to deserve it. -- James Russell Lowell
Once I worshipped Keats for dying young. Now I think it's braver to die old. -- Erica Jong
Shelley and Keats were the last English poets who were at all up to date in their chemical knowledge. -- John B. S. Haldane
I am a genius who has written poems that will survive with the best of Shakespeare, Wordsworth and Keats -- Irving Layton
With "poets dead and gone" as Keats says in "Mermaid Tavern" they are alive and talking to us and us to them. -- Gregory Orr
To like Keats is a test of fitness for understanding poetry, just as to like Shakespeare is a test of general mental capacity. -- George Gissing
Who would not spout the family teapot in order to talk with Keats for an hour about poetry, or with Jane Austen about the art of fiction? -- Virginia Woolf
This is why it is good to remember: if you want to get high, don't drink whiskey; read Shakespeare, Tennyson, Keats, Neruda, Hopkins, Millay, Whitman, aloud and let your body sing. -- Natalie
Keats, it must be remembered, was a sensualist. His poems ... reveal him as a man not altogether free from the vulgarities of sensualism, as well as one who was able to transmute it into perfect literature. -- Robert Wilson Lynd
Women don't want all that. Women just want a partner who is considerate and attentive, who will spoon with them while reciting Keats, and feed them organic yogurt by candlelight on a seaside cliff at sunset. -- Stephen Colbert
When an idea comes, spend silent time with it. Remember Keats's idea of Negative Capability and Kipling's advice to "drift, wait, and obey." Along with your gathering of hard data, allow yourself also to dream your idea into being. -- Rose Tremain
Descendants of pigeons once fed by Keats, Byron, George Sand, Chopin and many other famous lovers are still being fed, and the sudden sound when they all rise together, frightened away, is like the sound of giant sails flapping. -- Anais Nin
I did ... learn an important distinction in graduate school: a speculation about who had syphilis when is gossip if it's about your friends, a plot element if it's about a character in a novel, and scholarship if it's about John Keats. -- Margaret Atwood
All my early books are written as if I were Indian. In England, I had started writing as if I were English; now I write as if I were American. You take other peoples backgrounds and characters; Keats called it negative capability. -- Ruth Prawer Jhabvala
Make a list of all the lovers you've ever had. Warren Lasher Ed "Rubberhead" Catapano Charles Deats or Keats Alfonse Tuck it in your pocket. Leave it lying around, conspicuously. Somehow you lose it. Make "mislaid" jokes to yourself. Make another list. -- Lorrie Moore
Only those of our poets who kept solidly to the Shakespearean tradition achieved any measure of success. But Keats was the last great exponent of that tradition, and we all know how thin, how lacking in charm, the copies of Keats have become. -- Amy Lowell
I think for me in terms of this kind of dichotomy you have to hold the sense of negative capability in your mind - which is Keats line about being able to hold two different ideas 'without any irritable reach after fact or reason.' -- Anne Waldman
What I deeply want... is for Rumi to become vitally present for readers, part of what John Keats called our soul-making, that process that is both collective and uniquely individual, that happens outside time and space and inside, that is the ocean we all inhabit and each singular droplet-self. -- Coleman Barks
I do think better of womankind than to suppose they care whether Mister John Keats five feet high likes them or not. -- John Keats
It's been such a deep and amazing journey for me, getting close to John Keats, and also I love Shelley and Byron. I mean, the thing about the Romantic poets is that they've got the epitaph of romantic posthumously. They all died really young, and Keats, the youngest of them all. -- Jane Campion
When Keats says: 'Axioms in philosophy are not axioms until they are proved upon our pulses', what he means is that we don't necessarily believe what a poem is saying if it comes out and tells us in an absolutely head-on, in-your-face way; we only believe it to be true if we feel it to be true. -- Andrew Motion
There's no artist in this world that doesn't enjoy the dream that if they have bad reviews now, the story of Keats can redeem them, in their fantasy or imagination, in the future. I think Keats' poem 'Endymion' is a really difficult poem, and I'm not surprised that a lot of people pulled it apart in a way. -- Jane Campion

Send