Fernando Pessoa Quotes

The emotions are sometimes so strong that I work without knowing it. The strokes come like speech.

I think my poems immediately come out of the sensuous and emotional experiences I have.

What is drawing? It is working oneself through an invisible iron wall that seems to stand between what one feels and what one can do.

Whatever poetry that was in me was coming out in the form of constructing art books!

A lot of time when I'm creating songs, they're in real time. When I'm writing the song, I feel what I'm feeling for its full potential. As soon as the song is over, I'm like, I created art.

The work of art is born of the intelligence's refusal to reason the concrete. It marks the triumph of the carnal.

Poetry is either something that lives like fire inside you -- like music to the musician or Marxism to the Communist -- or else it is nothing, an empty, formalized bore around which pedants can endlessly drone their notes and explanations.

Art is the ability to communicate through an intermediary and to convey one's feelings through an isolated object. It's inspiration and incubation. Putting my subjective feelings into an objective form and then on to you for a subjective interpretation.

Art is revelation instead of information, expression instead of description, creation instead of imitation or repetition. Art is concerned with the HOW, not the WHAT; not with literal content, but with the performance of the factual content. The performance - how it is done - that is the content of art.

grievance does not make for great art.

The poet in prose or verse - the creator - can only stamp his images forcibly on the page in proportion as he has forcibly felt, ardently nursed, and long brooded over them.

The object, which is back of every true work of art, is the attainment of a state of being, a state of high functioning, a more than ordinary moment of existence. In such moments activity is inevitable, and whether this activity is with brush, pen, chisel, or tongue, its result is but a by-product of the state, a trace, the footprint of the state.

Art arises from sources other than logic." (p.32)

I have tried to remember throughout that poetry is made by flesh-and-blood human beings. It is a bloody art. It lives on a human scale and thrives when it is passed from hand to hand.

It is possible that, through horizontal and vertical lines constructed with awareness, but not with calculation, led by high intuition, and brought to harmony and rhythm, these basic forms of beauty, supplemented if necessary by other direct lines or curves, can become a work of art, as strong as it is true.

I'm now making myself as scummy as I can. Why? I want to be a poet, and I'm working at turning myself into a seer. You won't understand any of this, and I'm almost incapable of explaining it to you. The idea is to reach the unknown by the derangement of all the senses. It involves enormous suffering, but one must be strong and be a born poet. It's really not my fault.

Art does not come from thinking but from responding.

Thus far, everything I've made has come out of my really feeling it, out of the fire of my life.

Great art is never produced for its own sake. It is too difficult to be worth the effort.

Painting or poetry is made as one makes love - a total embrace, prudence thrown to the winds, nothing held back.

I think my poems immediately come out of the sensuous and emotional experiences I have, but I must say I cannot sympathise with these cries from the heart that are informed by nothing except a needle or a knife, or whatever it is.

Something is always born of excess: great art was born of great terror, great loneliness, great inhibitions, instabilities, and it always balances them.

Art is a selective re-creation of reality according to an artists metaphysical value judgments.