Vladimir Mayakovsky Quotes

A peculiar fact about termite-tapeworm-fungus-moss art is that it goes always forward, eating its own boundaries, and, likely as not, leaves nothing in its path other than the signs of eager, industrious, unkempt activity.

When poetry is on the money, 12 words can slay you. I admire that greatly.

In our language rhyme is a barrel. A barrel of dynamite. The line is a fuse. The line smoulders to the end and explodes; and the town is blown sky-high in a stanza.

Destruction CAN be beautiful!

A Dionysian life task needs the hardness of the hammer and one of its first essentials is without doubt the joy to be found even in destruction.

And I imagine... with great pleasure... all the horrible stirrings of the nonmanifested to bring forth the scream which creates the universe. Maybe one day I'll see you trembling, and you'll go into convulsion and grow larger and smaller until your mouth opens and the world will come from your mouth, escaping through the window like a river, and it will flood the city. And then we'll begin to live.

People who care about records are always giving me a hard time. I mean, I would destroy records in performances, and break them, and whatever I could do to them to create a sound that was something else than just the sound that was in the groove.

All mankind is now learning that these nuclear weapons can only serve to destroy, never become beneficial.

Power, like a desolating pestilence, Pollutes whate'er it touches

Poetry seems to be the only weapon able to beat language, using language's own means.

When I started to do these Pop paintings seriously, I used all these other paintings - the abstract ones - as mats. I was painting in the bedroom, and I put them on the floor so I wouldn't get paint on the floor. They got destroyed.

A fire in a forest is alive with terror and power.

In the early '60s, it was still a fairly subversive thing, though, to say that you should take a painting, cut it, set it on fire, step on it, hammer nails into it.

I don't come up with ideas in a test tube; I come up with ideas by breaking test tubes. That's how I've always been.

Anytime you create art, you create a mess. I mean, 'Hamlet' is a mess!

For me, the power of the poetry in 'Milk and Honey' is the feeling you get after finished reading the poem. It's the emotion you feel once you've read the last word, and that is only possible when the diction is easy, and you don't get stuck on every other word, you don't know what the word means.

A tranquil city of good laws, fine architecture, and clean streets is like a classroom of obedient dullards, or a field of gelded bulls - whereas a city of anarchy is a city of promise.

Water is powerful. It can wash away earth, put out fire, and even destroy iron.

Nothing is more creative... nor destructive... than a brilliant mind with a purpose.

Chloe turned to Vetch. The poet said gently, "You see, you do have power. Words give you power, to create or destroy." His eyes flickered to Clare. "Even to forgive.

My mother was a restorer, she repaired broken things. I don't do that. I destroy things. I cannot go the straight line. I must destroy, rebuild, destroy again. My rhythm is not the same. My mother moved in a straight line: I go from one extreme to the other.

The storm ate up September’s cry of despair, delighted at its mischief, as all storms are.

The Very Big Stupid is a thing which breeds by eating The Future. Have you seen it? It sometimes disguises itself as a good-looking quarterly bottom line, derived by closing the R&D department.

Gerry?' Laurel had to strain to hear thought the noise on the other end of the line. 'Gerry? Where are you?' 'London. A phone booth on Fleet Street.' 'The city still has working phone booths?' 'It would appear so. Unless this is the Tardis, in which case I'm in serious trouble.

I am mountains that crush. I am waves that crash. I am storms that shatter. I am the end.