12 Sylvia Plath Quotes for Writers and About Writing

Here are 12 Sylvia Plath quotes for writers and about writing from the author of The Colossus and Other Poems, Ariel, and The Bell Jar. In these quotes, Plath covers poetry, love, Shakespeare, and more.

Here are 12 Sylvia Plath quotes for writers and about writing from the author of The Colossus and Other Poems, Ariel, and The Bell Jar. In these quotes, Plath covers poetry, love, Shakespeare, and more.

Sylvia Plath was best known as an American author of The Bell Jar, Ariel, and The Colossus and Other Poems. She was a member of the confessional poetry movement, which has often led to debate about how autobiographical her writings were, were not, and/or if it should matter in literary interpretation of the text.

Plath married the poet Ted Hughes, and the two lived in the United States and England before separating in 1962. On February 11, 1963, she took her own life at the age of 30. Her posthumous collection, The Collected Poems, won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1982.

Here are 12 Sylvia Plath quotes for writers and about writing.

12 Sylvia Plath quotes for writers and about writing

"At one point, I was absolutely wild for Auden."

"Daddy, I have had to kill you."

"I always like someone who can teach me something practical."

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"I may never be happy, but tonight I am content."

"I'm a rather political person."

"It's presumptuous to say that one is influenced by someone like Shakespeare. One reads Shakespeare."

"Love set you going like a fat gold watch."

"My first book The Colossus, I can't read any of the poems aloud now. I didn't write them to be read aloud."

"Perfection is terrible, it cannot have children."

"Poetry is a tyrannical discipline."

"Some things are hard to write about. After something happens to you, you go to write it down, and either you over dramatize it or underplay it, exaggerate the wrong parts or ignore the important ones. At any rate, you never write it quite the way you want to."

"I believe that one should be able to control and manipulate experiences, even the most terrifying, with an informed and intelligent mind."

Robert Lee Brewer is Senior Editor of Writer's Digest, which includes managing the content on WritersDigest.com and programming virtual conferences. He's the author of 40 Plot Twist Prompts for Writers: Writing Ideas for Bending Stories in New Directions, The Complete Guide of Poetic Forms: 100+ Poetic Form Definitions and Examples for Poets, Poem-a-Day: 365 Poetry Writing Prompts for a Year of Poeming, and more. Also, he's the editor of Writer's Market, Poet's Market, and Guide to Literary Agents. Follow him on Twitter @robertleebrewer.