Robert Bly Quotes

There are things which some people never attempt during their whole lives, but one of these is not poetry. Poetry attacks all human beings sooner or later, and, like the measles, is mild or violent according to the age of the sufferer.

Everybody interprets things differently with their own perception, and I want poetry to pull out of them their own feelings.

A lyric has to mean something to me, something that has happened to me.

However far fiction writers stray from their own lives and experiences - and I stray pretty far from mine - I think, ultimately, that we may be writing what we need to write in some way, albeit unconsciously.

Poetry is the revelation of a feeling that the poet believes to be interior and personal which the reader recognizes as his own.

I'm conscious of a series of circles working its way through my life. And at this particular moment I have come round to the beginning of my writing cycle. It begins with poetry. There's hardly a day that goes past on which I don't write poetry.

I do believe that music has an intense power to connect us together, to inspire us to become ourselves.

From the night, his solitude, the poet finds day and starts a diary that is lethal to the inert. The dark landscape yields a dialogue.

The most astonishing joy is to receive from the muses the gift of a whole lyric.

The reason I write is that I'm not in dialogue with my emotions; writing puts me in touch with myself.

When I went to see certain shows when I was a kid, they changed my life. They made me tap into that place inside myself that I was unable to get to, so music is that tool, that bridge, and that's the kind of music I'm interested in making.

For what is a poem but a hazardous attempt at self-understanding: it is the deepest part of autobiography.

Directing is all tied up with childhood loneliness. It's such an odd thing to end up doing.

A poem gives me a chance to have an encounter with a feeling, with an experience, with a wish, with an idea.

I'm inspired by my surroundings. That's why I create dresses or videos around simple everyday things! I also love playing with nostalgic things from my childhood like cartoons. I like my art to trigger some sort of memory from my viewers, something they can relate to.

I've written poetry most of my life.

When you start to think of the arts as not this thing that is going to get you somewhere in terms of becoming an artist or becoming famous or whatever it is that people do, but rather a way of making being in the world not just bearable, but fascinating, then it starts to get interesting again.

I decided I needed something that I could feel as passionate about as acting, and something in which I could completely lose myself. I started painting, and I'm still doing it.

To me Art (poetry) is a continuous and continuing process and that when a man fails to write good poetry he fails to live fully or well.

Poems give you the lives of others and then circle in on your own inner world.

Critics write out of intellectual exercise, not poets. Poets write straight from the heart.

It occurred to me that I would like to be a poet. The chief qualification, I understand is that you must be born. Well, I hunted up my birth certificate, and found that I was all right on that score.

Once a year I try writing a poem, usually because I've read some poetry that amazed me and I want to do that.

When I've heard a piece of music or seen a painting that moves me, it gives me something.