Quotes About Art

I'm only interested in poetry.

and if I have any advice to give to anybody it's this: take up watercolor painting.

There is a time to stop reading, there is a time to STOP trying to WRITE, there is a time to kick the whole bloated sensation of ART out on its whore-ass.

I do think that poetry is important though, if you don't strive at it, if you don't fill it full of stars and falseness.

And if there is anybody out there who is crazy enough to want to become a writer, I'd say go ahead, spit in the eye of the sun, hit those keys, it's the best madness going, the centuries need help, the species cry for light and gamble and laughter. Give it to them. There are enough words for all of us.

it's so easy to be a poet and so hard to be a man.

All of which is to say, I didn't pay a hell of a lot of attention to grammar, and when I write it is for the love of the word, the color, like tossing paint on a canvas, and using a lot of ear and having read a bit here and there, I generally come out ok, but technically I don't know what's happening, nor do I care.

Writing is its own intoxication.

of one hundred movies there's one that is fair, one that's good and ninety eight that are very bad. most movies start badly and steadily get worse

I went over to see Marina two or three or four times a week. I knew as long as I could see the girl I would be all right…. Soon after, I got a letter from Fay. She and the child were living in a hippie commune in New Mexico. It was a nice place, she said. Marina would be able to breathe there. She enclosed a little drawing the girl had made for me.

Van Gogh cut off his ear gave it to a prostitute who flung it away in extreme disgust. Van, whores don't want ears they want money. I guess that's why you were such a great painter: you didn't understand much else.

Van Gogh writing his brother for paints Hemingway testing his shotgun Celine going broke as a doctor of medicine the impossibility of being human

They, all of them, seemed to put literary form in front of the actuality and living of life itself.

I emit, I hiss a rather tired and gentle word like shit, then tear this page from the machine. it's your.

my poems are only bits of scratching on the floor of a cage.

We are hardly ever as that which we create

have to be on the cross and bleeding in order to have soul. They want you half mad, dribbling down your shirt front. I've had enough of the cross, my tank is full of that. If I can stay off the cross, I still have plenty to run on. Too much. Let them get on the cross, I'll congratulate them. But pain doesn't create writing, a writer does.

I talked to Miriam. She says you paint and write, you're an artist at rare times I'm an artist; at most other times I'm nothing

the next time you listen to Borodin remember his wife used his compositions to line the cat boxes with or to cover jars of sour milk;

Lawyers, doctors, plumbers, they made all the money. Writers? Writers starved. Writers suicided. Writers went mad.

art as the spirit wanes the form appears.

There's no way I can stop writing, it's a form of insanity.

it's as if he were hiding in there and I want to console him, say: "I am sorry, poor fellow, but creation has its limits.

a poem is a city burning