Jim Jarmusch Quotes

I always like to talk about how important space is. Art is in the spaces. Anybody can sing a note; it takes an artist to sing the spaces. Anybody can paint a brushstroke; it takes an artist to know when not to put the brushstroke.

Poetry has never let me down. Without poetry, I would have found life less comprehensible, less bearable and infinitely less enjoyable.

One can speak poetry just by arranging colors well, just as one can say comforting things in music.

If you're a poet, you do something beautiful. I mean, you're supposed to leave something beautiful after you get off the page and everything. The ones you're talking about don't leave a single, solitary thing beautiful. All that maybe the slightly better ones do is sort of get inside your head and leave something there, but just because they do, just because they know how to leave something, it doesn't have to be a poem for heaven's sake. It may just be some kind of terribly fascinating, syntaxy droppings--excuse the expression. Like Manlius and Esposito and all those poor men.

To me, art begets art. Painting feeds the eye just as poetry feeds the ear, which is to say that both feed the soul.

In music, you feel a connection to the voice and think about the person behind it. In art that's secondary.

Look at any inspired painting. It's like a gong sounding; it puts you in a state of reverberation.

The privilege I've had as a curator is not just the discovery of new works... but what I've discovered about myself and what I can offer in the space of an exhibition - to talk about beauty, to talk about power, to talk about ourselves, and to talk and speak to each other.

I would admit that poetry is something more than mere communication and that if that 'something more' could be abstracted from the whole, it might well prove to be that which makes the whole a poem.

Literature is a state of culture, poetry is a state of grace, before and after culture.

For me, the best rock is not what you play - it's what you're not playing.

The great poems are not about experience, but are the experience itself, felt in the body.

The claims I'm making for art are simply the claims that we naturally make around music or around poetry. We're much more relaxed around those art forms. We're willing to ask, 'How could this find a place in my heart?'

I feel that art is beyond language.

I would define, in brief, the Poetry of words as the Rhythmical Creation of Beauty. Its sole arbiter is taste. With the intellect or with the conscience, it has only collateral relations. Unless incidentally, it has no concern whatever either with duty or with truth.

Poetry is the breath of beauty.

First of all I think that poetry is very noble and I always have with me the sense of the nobility of poetry.

I think the pleasure of form is that you have a companion with you besides all the poetry you have ever read.

I may turn out an intellectual, but I'll never write anything but mediocre poetry.

There's more substance in my prose and my poetry than in all my films together. Writing is a more direct way of expressing yourself because, in cinema, you always have finances, organization, actors, technical apparatus and all that stuff coming in between.

Poetry has been the longest pleasure of my life.

There's something immediate about the experience of reading a poem - whether it's the music or some other element of it - that just seems to access another part of the brain. You know, Charles Olson talks about this transfer of energy that happens between the writer and the reader of the poem. I guess there's something essential to me about acknowledging upfront the immensity of it - the difficulty of it - and even allowing that to be the subject.

Were it not for music, we might in these days say, the Beautiful is dead.

If we respected only what is inevitable and has a right to be, music and poetry would resound along the streets.

Poetry is a natural energy resource of our country.