William Butler Yeats Quotes

I was born and raised in Dublin, Ireland and it is still home to me. My writing has taken me all over the world, but this is the place I come back to and the place where I find it easiest to write.

I guess the way to keep a grip on reality is just to take breaks in between albums like most normal bands do. Go home and be a person and hang out with your friends. Do separate things and get back to earth and write songs and go out there again.

Dublin is really fun, and Irish people are hilarious.

Whatever makes a child want to glue macaroni on a paper plate and paint the assemblage and see it on the refrigerator - that has always been strong in me.

Never leave the site of a strong idea without doing something to execute around it.

Pictures are wasted unless the motive power which impelled you to action is strong and stirring.

For some people, fame kills it and becomes more important than the music or the performance. But for me fame is like rocket fuel. The more my fans like what I'm doing, the more I want to give back to them. And my passion is so strong I can't sleep - I haven'tslept for three days.

The imagination loses vitality as it ceases to adhere to what is real.

A big enough artist, I say, can eat anything, must eat everything and then alchemize it. Only the feeble writer is afraid of expansion.

I never thought of myself as being a genius. I don't know what genius is. I think a far better expression is a retriever, a lovely strong golden retriever that brings things back from the past, or retrieves things from our common blood memory

Many are poets, but without the name;For what is Poesy but to createFrom overfeeling Good or Ill; and aimAt an external life beyond our fate,And be the new Prometheus of new men,Bestowing fire from Heaven, and then, too late,Finding the pleasure given repaid with pain

The architect represents neither a Dionysian nor an Apollinian condition: here it is the mighty act of will, the will which moves mountains, the intoxication of the strong will, which demands artistic expression. The most powerful men have always inspired the architects; the architect has always been influenced by power.

Said the river: imagine everything you can imagine, then keep on going.

I want to give a picture of Dublin so complete that if the city suddenly disappeared from the earth it could be reconstructed out of my book.

Persons of genius, it is true, are, and are always likely to be, a small minority; but in order to have them, it is necessary to preserve the soil in which they grow.

Art is the giving by each man of his evidence to the world. Those who wish to give, love to give, discover the pleasure of giving. Those who give are tremendously strong.

When I was writing The Shadow of the Glen I got more aid than any learning could have given me from a chink in the floor of the old Wicklow house where I was staying, that let me hear what was being said by the servent girls in the kitchen.

I shot an arrow into the air, It fell to earth, I knew not where; For, so swiftly it flew, the sight Could not follow it in its flight. I breathed a song into the air, It fell to earth, I knew not where; For who has sight so keen and strong, That it can follow the flight of song? Long, long afterward, in an oak I found the arrow, still unbroke; And the song, from beginning to end, I found again in the heart of a friend.

Inspiration comes from so many things that it's hard to define what that is or when it happens. It's always been a strong feeling that comes over me in a given moment, and it feels like hope, desire, strength, magic, excitement. A supreme motivation to create or do something special. To win for love.

I am very fond of the people, landscape, poetry, music, history and the Guinness. Being there makes me think of my mother and my grandmother - always sentimental and warm thoughts.

It is often said that in Ireland there is an excess of genius unsustained by talent; but there is talent in the tongues.

American Muse, whose strong and diverse heart So many men have tried to understand But only made it smaller with their art, Because you are as various as your land.

Most of the time I write my best songs just from feeling a strong emotion, so whether I'm just really angry or really sad or really happy, I immediately sit down at a piano and I begin writing a song.

Ireland is not at all a simple place, and in many ways it is spare and sad. It has no wealth, no power, no stability, no influence, no fashion, no size. Its only real arts are song and drama and poem. But Limerick alone has two thousand ruined castles and surely that many practicing poets.

To live in a great idea means to treat the impossible as though it were possible. It is just the same with a strong character; and when an idea and a character meet, things arise which fill the world with wonder for thousands of years.