Paul Valery Quotes

I have a high guilt quotient. A poem can go through as many as 50 or 60 drafts. It can take from a day to two years-or longer.

Movies are not finished. They are abandoned. A movie is never finished.

I can work on a verse for a very long time before realising it's not any good and then, and only then, can I discard it.

A book is never finished; it's abandoned.

I can't bear to finish things, beyond a certain point they get heavy. There's something so dead about a finished painting.

Painting is damned difficult - you always think you've got it, but you haven't.

I deliberate over the lyrics; I really do. I'll come up with one line in a day, and then it might be a couple of days before I come up with the rhyming line. It's never been easy for me.

A face in the picture would bother me, so I'd rub it out with the turpentine and do it over.

I write slowly, and I write many, many drafts. I probably have to work as hard as anyone, and maybe harder, to finish a poem. I often write a poem over years, because it takes me a long time to figure out what to say and how best to say it.

When it comes to lyrics, I just write down a lot of things, and only a very tiny fraction of it, I think, is any good.

I love arranging the words and having them fall on the ear the right way, and you know you're not quite there, and you're redoing it and redoing it, and there's a wonderful thrill to it. But it is hard. It's a job of tremendous anxiety for me.

I've thought of the last line of some poems for years and tried them out, It wouldn't work because the last line was much too beautiful for the poem.

All good poetry is forged slowly and patiently, link by link, with sweat and blood and tears.

I was very committed to the process of composing, working at poems, putting things together and taking them apart like some kind of experimental filmmaker.

There's an old saying that you don't ever finish a movie, you abandon it, and I really believe that. I never walk away from a take and pat myself on the back.

Art is never finished, only abandoned.

It took me a good two-and-a-half to three years to write 'Dhobi Ghat' and more importantly be satisfied with it.

The thing is, I've been writing for a long time now, trying to be a poet for the last 40 years, and it's still very difficult not to second-guess myself when reading my own work.

Art is never finished. It is only abandoned.

You keep working on your piece over and over, trying to get the sections and paragraphs and sentences and the whole just right, but there's a point at which you can tell you've begun hurting the work with your perfectionism. Then you have to release the work to new eyes.

In the eyes of those lovers of perfection, a work is never finished - a word that for them has no sense - but abandoned; and this abandonment, whether to the flames or to the public (and which is the result of weariness or an obligation to deliver) is a kind of an accident to them, like the breaking off of a reflection, which fatigue, irritation, or something similar has made worthless.

I've spent so long on some paintings that I no longer know what to think of them, and I am definitely getting harder to please; nothing satisfies me.

I would say everything should be able to come into a poem, but I can't put toothbrushes into a poem, I really can't!

Negatives are the notebooks, the jottings, the false starts, the whims, the poor drafts, and the good draft but never the completed version of the work The print and a proper one is the only completed photograph, whether it is specifically shaded for reproduction, or for a museum wall.

There's nothing more difficult than a line.