Quotes About Art

Clutter and mess show us that life is being lived...Tidiness makes me think of held breath, of suspended animation... Perfectionism is a mean, frozen form of idealism, while messes are the artist's true friend. What people somehow forgot to mention when we were children was that we need to make messes in order to find out who we are and why we are here.

Roses are red, violets are blue, I'm sick of this poem, you probably are too.

If I am an angel, paint me with black wings.

But if one is going to create characters, I suggest that one is well-advised not to attach to them the names of real persons, living or dead.

The beautiful feeling after writing a poem is on the whole better even than after sex, and that's saying a lot.

Out of used furniture she made a tree.

The real me lives in words, not in what words mean.

I rot on the wall, my own Dorian Gray.

Poetry, after all, milks the unconscious.

My poems only come when I have almost lost the ability to utter a word. To speak, in a way, of the unspeakable.

Darling, the composer has stepped into fire.

Poems reach me, and hold me, and give me pleasure.

I think language is beautiful. I even think insanity is beautiful (surely the root of language), except that it is painful.

He turns the key. Presto! It opens this book of odd tales which transform the Brothers Grimm. Transform? As if an enlarged paper clip could be a piece of sculpture. (And it could.)

My business is words. Words are like labels, or coins, or better, like swarming bees. I confess I am only broken by the sources of things; as if words were counted like dead bees in the attic, unbuckled from their yellow eyes and their dry wings. I must always forget how one word is able to pick out another, to manner another, until I have got something I might have said... but did not.

I am, each day, typing out the God my typewriter believes in. Very quick. Very intense.

Aunque la lluvia maldiga la ventana/ hágase el poema

Turn wounds into words

She sees to oars and oarlocks for the dinghy, has placed wild flowers at the window at breakfast, sat by the potter's wheel at midday, set forth three children under the moon, three cherubs drawn by Michelangelo, done this with her legs spread out in the terrible months in the chapel.

Suicide is, after all, the opposite of the poem.

A poem might be defined as thinking about feelings - about human feelings and frailties.

Each word bears its weight, so you have to read my poems quite slowly.

Yes, I do often write poems from the mind, but I hope I don't ignore feelings and emotions.

I dislike literary jargon and never use it. Criticism has only one function and that is to help readers read and understand literature. It is not a science, it is an aid to art.