Art distills sensation and embodies it with enhanced meaning in a memorable form - or else it is not art.
The poet must put on the passion he wants to represent.
[Songs] have to be a part of you. They have to be in your DNA. That's how I approached it.
Every artist is in everything he creates, and indeed if the truth is told, every person is in his life, in his work, whatever his work may be, and this is visible in his face, figure, stance, movement, and totality.
There is a large element of me in every role I do.
Poetry too is a little incarnation, giving body to what had been before invisible and inaudible.
An author should never conceive himself as bringing into existence beauty or wisdom which did not exist before, but simply and solely as trying to embody in terms of his own art some reflection of eternal Beauty and Wisdom.
I don't play roles, I play characters. There is a vast difference between the two.
On Heartbreaker, I had to sing those songs. I drank the way I did those songs. I ate the way I did those songs. I communicated the way I did those songs.
There's a particular sensitivity required to be an artist, and a certain vulnerability, perhaps, and also, somewhere between, you're in your body a lot, too. It's much more physical than one would imagine because I think it's the body where the imagination lives somehow. I do feel the imagination isn't just in the brain up there.
I feel that the essence of dance is the expression of man--the landscape of his soul. I hope that every dance I do reveals something of myself or some wonderful thing a human can be.
A great writer has a high respect for values. His essential function is to raise life to the dignity of thought, and this he does by giving it a shape.
A song has to take on character, shape, body and influence people to an extent that they use it for their own devices. It must affect them not just as a song, but as a lifestyle. The rock stars have assimilated all kinds of philosophies, styles, histories, writings, and they throw out what they have gleaned from that.
I love the physicality of instruments, and instruments as objects, like dancers are bodies.
Poetry is also the physical self of the poet, and it is impossible to separate the poet from his poetry.
