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I didn't want to be like Yeats; I wanted to be Yeats. -- John Berryman
With him in defense, we could play Arthur Askey in goal. (after signing Ron Yeats) -- Bill Shankly
Yeats, you need ten years in the library, but I have need of ten years in the wilderness. -- Lionel Johnson
The censorious said she slept in a hammock and understood Yeats's poems, but her family denied both stories. -- Hector Hugh Munro
Earth, receive an honored guest; William Yeats is laid to rest. Let the Irish vessel lie Emptied of its poetry. -- W. H. Auden
One day in Dipstick, Nebraska, or Landfill, Oklahoma, is worth more to me than an eternity in Dante's plastic Paradiso, or Yeats's gold-plated Byzantium. -- Edward Abbey
It's just like Yeats said. In dreams begin responsibilities. Flip this around and you could say that where there's no power to imagine, no responsibility can arise. -- Haruki Murakami
The death of every art form seems imminent at least once in every century; but while the very funeral arrangements go forward, some child is born who is Michelangelo, Picasso, Yeats. -- Reynolds Price
I read as much poetry as time allows and circumstance dictates: No heartache can pass without a little Dorothy Parker, no thunderstorm without W. H. Auden, no sleepless night without W. B. Yeats. -- J. Courtney Sullivan
I remember Francis Bacon would say that he felt he was giving art what he thought it previously lacked. With me, it's what Yeats called the fascination with what's difficult. I'm only trying to do what I can't do. -- Lucian Freud
I wanted to see who this Yeats person was, and I said to my mother, 'I want a book by this person.' And she bought it for me, and a lot of it was over my head, but I had it. -- Patti Smith
Alister McGrath has now written two books with my name in the title. The poet W. B. Yeats, when asked to say something about bad poets who made a living by parasitizing him, wrote the splendid line, 'was there ever dog that praised his fleas? -- Richard Dawkins
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
Is it not certain that the Creator yawns in earthquake and thunder and other popular displays, but toils in rounding the delicate spiral of a shell? -Yeats, The Trembling of the Veil -- William Butler Yeats
I think that great poetry is the most interesting and complex use of the poet's language at that point in history, and so it's even more exciting when you read a poet like Yeats, almost 100 years old now, and you think that perhaps no one can really top that. -- Diane Wakoski
I carry Yeats with me wherever I go. He's my constant companion. I always can find some comfort in Yeats no matter what the situation is. Months and months and months go by and I know I need to switch to Shelley or somebody else, but right now Yeats is enough for me. -- Linda Hamilton
There are those who regard this history of past strife and exile as better forgotten. But, to use the phrase of Yeats, let us not casually reduce "that great past to a trouble of fools." For we need not feel the bitterness of the past to discover its meaning for the present and the future. -- John F. Kennedy
The best people in a dying culture are the outcasts considered crazy by the leaders; the ones most disillusioned with their own culture. In Yeats' phrase, "the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity." Intense emotional attachment to any value, any virtue, any set of "shoulds" is a disease, a mental illness, a condition of self-murder and cultural assassination. -- Brad Blanton
... woman is frequently praised as the more "creative" sex. She does not need to make poems, it is argued; she has no drive to make poems, because she is privileged to make babies. A pregnancy is as fulfilling as, say, Yeats' Sailing to Byzantium.... To call a child a poem may be a pretty metaphor, but it is a slur on the labor of art. -- Cynthia Ozick
And I love Jane Austen's use of language too--the way she takes her time to develop a phrase and gives it room to grow, so that these clever, complex statements form slowly and then bloom in my mind. Beethoven does the same thing with his cadence and phrasing and structure. It's a fact: Jane Austen is musical. And so's Yeats. And Wordsworth. All the great writers are musical. -- Andrew Clements
Yeats was 18th-century oratory, almost. -- Seamus Heaney
My two great heroes are W. B. Yeats and Federico Garcia Lorca. -- Leonard Cohen
My two great heroes are W. B. Yeats and Fernando Garcia Lorca. -- Leonard Cohen
I first came across 'The Lake Isle of Innisfree' in college, with other anthologized poems by Yeats. -- Billy Collins
When I was starting to write, the great influence was T.S. Eliot and after that William Butler Yeats. -- Howard Nemerov
When Yeats said the center cannot hold, he was talking for himself, but it was true for the rest of us as well. -- Jean-Luc Godard
Yeats, protected to some extent by the Nationalistic movement, wrote out of a somewhat protected world, and so his work does not touch life deeply. -- Patrick Kavanagh
Yeats was the greatest poet of our times . . . certainly the greatest in this language, and so far as I am able to judge, in any language. -- T. S. Eliot
Blake has always been a favorite, the lyrics, not so much the prophetic books, but I suppose Yeats influenced me more as a young poet, and the American, Robert Frost. -- Anne Stevenson
I am talking about poetry. It's like that line from [John] Yeats: I go back to "where all the ladders start/ In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart." -- Robert Hass
I read as much poetry as time allows and circumstance dictates: No heartache can pass without a little Dorothy Parker, no thunderstorm without W. H. Auden, no sleepless night without W. B. Yeats." -- J. Courtney Sullivan
For [W. B.] Yeats magic was not so much a kind of poetry as poetry a kind of magic, and the object of both alike was evocation of energies and knowledge from beyond normal consciousness. -- Kathleen Raine
To you, W. B. Yeats, good praiser, wholesome dispraiser, heavy-handed judge, open-handed helper of us all, I offer a play of my plays for every night of the week, because you like them, and because you have taught me my trade. -- Lady Gregory
As a young man, Yeats spoke to me in a way I could understand. Shakespeare I couldn't understand, but Yeats I could. It was his subject matter and also I really admired the way he put his personal life on the line. -- Leonard Cohen
Irish fathers still have certain responsibilities, and by the time my two daughters turned seven, they could swim, ride a bike, sing at least one part of a Woody Guthrie song, and recite all of W. B. Yeats's 'The Song of Wandering Aengus.' -- Adrian McKinty
Most of my influences from outside the commerical strange fiction genre came in with university, discovering James Joyce and Wallace Stevens, Blake and Yeats, Pinter and Borges. And meanwhile within those genres I was discovering Gibson and Shepard, Jeter and Powers, Lovecraft and Peake. -- Hal Duncan
Alister McGrath has now written two books with my name in the title. The poet W. B. Yeats, when asked to say something about bad poets who made a living by parasitizing him, wrote the splendid line, 'was there ever dog that praised his fleas?" -- Richard Dawkins

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