Marianne Moore Quotes

You wind up creating from silence, like painting a picture on a blank canvas that could bring tears to somebody's eyes. As songwriters, our blank canvas is silence. Then we write a song from an idea that can change somebody's life. Songwriting is the closest thing to magic that we could ever experience. That's why I love songwriting.

The ode lives upon the ideal, the epic upon the grandiose, the drama upon the real.

If poets were realistic, they wouldn't be poets.

The poet doesn't invent. He listens.

Any artist, in any field, wants to press deeper, to discover further. Image and sound play are among the strongest colors available to poetry's palette. For a long time, I've wanted to invite in more strangeness, more freedom of imagination. Yet music, seeing, and meaning are also cohering disciplines. They can be stretched, and that is part of poetry's helium pleasure. But not to the point of breaking.

The poet is he who inspires, rather than he who is inspired.

The moment you cheat for the sake of beauty, you know you're an artist.

At each moment, a poem might grow into a totally different shape. It is not so much like working in a garden. It is more as if you remade the garden every day.

No more pronouncements on lousy verse. No more hidden competition. No more struggling not to be a square.

Music is not simply an orchestration of something, but it's also not something as trivial as honesty.

The Resistance is a moral certainty, not a poetic one. The true poet never uses words in order to punish someone. His judgment belongs to a creative order; it is not formulated as a prophetic scripture.

I want to create. I think that's the one word I can grow on.

The body is your instrument in dance, but your art is outside that creature, the body.

Poetry, even when apparently most fantastic, is always a revolt against artifice, a revolt, in a sense, against actuality.

The creative act amazes me. Whether it's poetry, whether it's music, it's an amazing process, and it has something to do with bringing forth the old out into the world to create and to bring forth that which will rejuvenate.

When truth has no burning, then it is philosophy, when it gets burning from the heart, it becomes poetry.

Where the spirit does not work with the hand, there is no art.

Language is a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, while all the time we long to move the stars to pity.

To give a body and a perfect form to one's thought, this - and only this - is to be an artist.

Somebody informed me recently that the key to every art, from writing to gardening to sculpture, is creativity. I beg to differ.

Nature is commonplace. Imitation is more interesting.

I did not want to be a tree, a flower or a wave. In a dancer's body, we as audience must see ourselves, not the imitated behavior of everyday actions, not the phenomenon of nature, not exotic creatures from another planet, but something of the miracle that is a human being.

I believe in creative work.

Lyrical poets have to be in touch with visceral experience. I've always tried to avoid virtual experiences. That's emerging in my fiction.

The music is the main thing and it's just as easy to write acceptable words.