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My advice to any poet; you have to be idle to write it. A pen, a notebook and idleness, those are the three requisites for the manufacture of poetry.

— John Cooper Clarke BBC Radio 4 - Desert Island Discs (2019)

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More quotes by John Cooper Clarke

You can count on him. He'll always let you down.

Marcel was a modern-day Robin Hood; he would rob from the rich because the poor have no money.

I Wanna Be Yours (2020)

You know, like they say: never trust a thin chef, or a doctor with leprosy.

I Wanna Be Yours (2020)

Having been a tubercular kid with a malformed physique, I have a dread of any situation where the shedding of garments might be required. I can't even swim.

I Wanna Be Yours (2020)

At some point, the Mod look had a short-lived Country Life moment, when the gorgeous mohair sheen of the three-button suit gave way to matte autumnal earth tones. Give it a name: fucking brown.

I Wanna Be Yours (2020)

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There is a property in the horizon which no man has but he whose eye can integrate all the parts, that is, the poet.

Ralph Waldo Emerson Nature (1836)

Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality.

T. S. Eliot Tradition and the Individual Talent (1919)

Poetry, unlike oratory, should not aim at clarity...but be dense with meaning, 'something to be chewed and digested'.

George Chapman Ovid's Banquet of Sense (1595)

I am no poet, but if you think for yourselves, as I proceed, the facts will form a poem in your minds.

Michael Faraday

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: John Cooper Clarke (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.