W. H. Auden Quotes

That impulse I think is a form of love. Poetry is something that comes to you, rather than your having to work out its form beforehand.

Art is the result of a creative impulse derived out of a consciousness of life.

Take a step, breathe in the world, give it out again in story, poem, song, art.

Art gives man a reminder that he is not just a consumer but a creator as well. It awakens in him the urge to struggle and perform great deeds; it fills him with the craving to pass on the Promethean fire to generations to come.

How certain human beings are able to create works of art is a mystery, and why they should wish to do so, at a great cost to themselves usually, is another mystery. Works are not created by one's life; every life is rich in material.

Let me read you some of my poetry. My poetry just takes me to another level.

You don't have to suffer to be a poet; adolescence is enough suffering for anyone.

Wonder and awe are the diet of the artist and without them the world would be far less meaningful to us than it is.

Making music and writing kind of come from the same creative place.

If there is to be art, if there is to be any aesthetic doing and seeing, one physiological condition is indispensable: frenzy.

The poet's mind is in fact a receptacle for seizing and storing up numberless feelings, phrases, images, which remain there until all the particles which can unite to form a new compound are present together.

In Spring! In the creation of art it must be as it is in Spring!

To make art you need to be inspired.

A writer - and, I believe, generally all persons - must think that whatever happens to him or her is a resource. All things have been given to us for a purpose, and an artist must feel this more intensely. All that happens to us, including our humiliations, our misfortunes, our embarrassments, all is given to us as raw material, as clay, so that we may shape our art.

When I started to take literature and poetry classes, I just started to get inspired by these new incredible works of art that I had never seen or heard of before. I wrote a lot of bad high-school poetry, just like pretty much everyone did, I think, at some point. For me, the inspiration never really stopped.

An original is a creation motivated by desire.

Do not copy nature. Art is an abstraction. Rather, bring your art forth by dreaming in front of her and think more of creation.

I think everybody has a painter inside of them somewhere.

To love is to transform; to be a poet.

Art begins when a man wishes to immortalize the most vivid moment he has ever lived.

It never was in the power of any man or any community to call the arts into being. They come to serve his actual wants, never to please his fancy.

Great art can only be created out of love.

O thou sculptor, painter, poet! Take this lesson to thy heart: That is best which lieth nearest; Shape from that thy work of art.

When I'm working, on stage, entertaining people, or watching someone do something amazing, it inspires me to be the best artist that I can be. I enjoy being around art - whether it be a museum, a Broadway show - or even writing a poem. Those are things that make me feel alive and inspire me.

Art is not delivered like the morning paper; it has to be stolen from Mount Olympus.