I am frequently astonished that it so often results in correct predictions of experimental results.
If I asked you about love, you'd probably quote me a sonnet. But you've never looked at a woman and been totally vulnerable. Known someone that could level you with her eyes, feeling like God put an angel on earth just for you. Who could rescue you from the depths of hell.
I thought I'd begin by reading a poem by Shakespeare, but then I thought, why should I? He never reads any of mine.
I prefer assonance and internal rhyme to end rhyme. I mean, the sonnet already looks like a box. Best not to get too boxed in, though.
You can't beat a good sonnet, and you can write a sonnet without being married to the damned thing.
Everything nourishes what is strong already
There is no objection to the proposal: in order to learn to be a poet, I shall try to write a sonnet. But the thing you must try to write, when you do so, is a real sonnet, and not a practice sonnet.
A true sonnet goes eight lines and then takes a turn for better or worse and goes six or eight lines more.
Scorn not the sonnet. Critic, you have frowned, Mindless of its just honours; with this key Shakespeare unlocked his heart.
If I wrote in a sonnet form, I would be distorting. Or if I had some great new idea for line breaks and I used it in a poem, but it's really not right for that poem, but I wanted it, that would be distorting.
Even if you walk exactly the same route each time - as with a sonnet - the events along the route cannot be imagined to be the same from day to day, as the poet's health, sight, his anticipations, moods, fears, thoughts cannot be the same.
Often you've read another poem that you think is so beautiful that you'd like to make something like that. And so you try to make a sonnet that works in a certain kind of way, or you try to make something that's songlike, or you create a refrain, or you love the way a poem works in two line stanzas and you try to do that.
The martini: the only American invention as perfect as the sonnet.
An intellectuals weapon is writing, but sometimes people react as if it were a firearm. A writer can do a lot to change the situation, but as far as I know, no dictatorship has fallen because of a sonnet.
Milton was the first person who really experimented with putting politics into sonnets.
To me there's no creativity without boundaries. If you're gonna write a sonnet, it's 14 lines, so it's solving the problem within the container.
A sentimental aphorism is even more a surprise than a hard- boiled sonnet.
When a sonnet is mediocre it is bad, for it should be sublime.
Elinor Lipman is to tweets what Shakespeare is to sonnets.
Better a live doggerel than a dead sonnet.
