Quotes About Art

My opinion is that a poet should express the emotion of all the ages and the thought of his own.

There is no scientific discoverer, no poet, no painter, no musician, who will not tell you that he found ready made his discovery or poem or picture - that it came to him from outside, and that he did not consciously create it from within.

I started earning a living as a poet rather early on.

I do not want to be bored listening to music that is muffled and known only to the poet himself.

A poet can feel free, in my estimation, to write a poem for himself. Or a painter can paint a painting for himself. You can write a short story for yourself. But for me, comedy by its nature is communal. If other people don't get it, I'm not sure why you are doing it.

A paranoiac like a poet, is born, not made.

From the throes of inspiration and the eddies of thought the poet may at last be able to arrive at, and convey the right admixture of words and meaning.

Too much is demanded by the critic, attempted by the poet.

The poet must decide not to impose his feelings in order to write without sentimentality.

Well, I still write poetry, but I wouldn't call myself a poet.

The reason a poet is a poet is to write poems, not to advertise himself as a poet.

It wasn't a deliberate decision to become a poet. It was something I found myself doing - and loving. Language became an addiction.

Gregory Corso used to get really pissed when people called Bob Dylan a 'poet.' After writing poetry for a few years, I can understand that.

I'm from the beatnik generation, where everybody wanted to be a poet or writer or something. And at that time, I was a jazz critic, and I was always thinking, theorizing about what makes great art or what's important in art.

I believe the poet shouldn't be in the poem at all except as a lens or as ears.

I think there's a deep impulse in most humans to do creative stuff, whether that's music or art, photography or writing. Most people at some point in their life say they want to do something creative - they want to be an actor, a director, a writer, a poet, a painter or whatever.

If you want to be a poet, you can just write it on a napkin, and it's the length of the napkin, I guess. But usually you decide you'll rhyme it, or you'll have a formula. In radio, that's something called, 'Close your eyes and listen.'

You don't become a poet if you want to make any money.

The attention one gets from being a poet isn't great.

When you put a poem on a Kindle, the lines are broken in order to fit on the screen. And so instead of being the poet's decision, it becomes the device's decision.

I thought that if one wanted to be a writer, one had to write novels because I didn't know that one could be a poet.

The best poems come from the world, go through the poet, and go back in to the world.

My working habit is to separate my aims as a painting from my aims as a poet. They come from very different places and ultimately lead me to very different places... I'll leave what I mean by 'places' ambiguous.

I wanted to be a poet. I wrote from ages 15 to 22, but I left it because I discovered, and fell in love with, cinema.