Quotes About Artistry

The crown of literature is poetry. It is its end and aim. It is the sublimest activity of the human mind. It is the achievement of beauty and delicacy. The writer of prose can only step aside when the poet passes.

A good style should show no signs of effort. What is written should seem a happy accident.

I made my song a coat Covered with embroideries Out of old mythologies From heel to throat; But the fools caught it, Wore it in the world's eyes As though they'd wrought it. Song, let them take it, For there's more enterprise In walking naked

I HAVE desired, like every artist, to create a little world out of the beautiful, pleasant, and significant things of this marred and clumsy world, and to show in a vision something of the face of Ireland to any of my own people who would look where I bid them.

All things can tempt me from this craft of verse.

A line will take us hours may be; Yet if it does not seem a moment's thought, Our stitching and unstitching has been nought.

Some writers confuse authenticity, which they ought always to aim at, with originality, which they should never bother about.

We were put on this earth to make things.

In the eyes of others a man is a poet if he has written one good poem. In his own he is only a poet at the moment when he is making his last revision to a new poem. The moment before, he was still only a potential poet; the moment after, he is a man who has ceased to write poetry, perhaps forever.

no poet can know what his poem is going to be like until he has written it.

Writers are magicians. They write down words, and, if they're good, you believe that what they write is real, just as you believe a good magician has pulled the coins out of your ear, or made his assistant disappear. But the words on the page have no connection to the person who wrote them. Writers live other peoples' lives for them.

Writers are magicians. They write down words, and, if they're good, you believe that what they write is real, just as you believe a good magician has pulled the coins out of your ear, or made his assistant disappear. But the words on the page have no connection to the person who wrote them. Writers live other peoples' lives for them. I don't write autobiography.

Poetry is like making a joke. If you get one word wrong at the end of a joke, you've lost the whole thing.

I didn't want to be a headshot and get a chance to go compete to sing-that's not me.

If you're lucky, and not a lot of actors are these days, you get the chance to create a character

I do a lot of performing, but don't get a chance to go to the studio and write good music.

I could probably spend the next five years reworking an album from ten years ago, if given the chance, to make it better - make it best, so to speak.

Without music, there is not the faintest chance [Bob Dylan] words would now be garlanded as they are.

The chances are that, in the course of his lifetime, the major poet will write more bad poems than the minor, simply because major poets write a lot.

When you have a chance to be an artist with an audience in your lifetime, you have to say thanks to your audience. That's a great thing. That's the best thing that can happen to an artist.

The power of art is not in communication but effect; what it does, not what it relates.

I'm so hard on myself. I play these sketches in my computer for friends and they say 'Gee whiz, the vocal's beautiful.' I hear, 'It needs to be better.'

I would still give my left ball to write anything as good as OK Computer.

If you've got a stick hitting a drum and you're programming it on a computer, it's so much more interesting than a sample playing back - it's something in the air, that's the magical ingredient.