James Russell Lowell Quotes

No artist is ahead of his time. He is his time; it is just that others are behind the times.

I didn't love Jim Morrison 'cause he was self-destructive. I loved him because of his work. Because of the way he merged poetry and rock-and-roll. Because he did something new.

Picasso is what is going to happen and what is happening; he is posterity and archaic time, the distant ancestor and our next-door neighbor. Speed permits him to be two places at once, to belong to all the centuries without letting go of the here and now.

Every great architect is - necessarily - a great poet. He must be a great original interpreter of his time, his day, his age.

Poets are the mad midwives to reality. They see not what is, nor what can be, but what must become.

No age is compelled to take its beauty from preceding epochs.

Every great work of art has two faces, one toward its own time and one toward the future, toward eternity.

The task of the artist at any time is uncompromisingly simple to discover what has not yet been done, and to do it.

All playwrights should be dead for three hundred years.

It is a hopeless endeavor to make the form and content of earlier architectural epochs usable for our time; in this, even the strongest artistic talent must fail. We see repeatedly how the outstanding builders fail to achieve an effect because their work does not serve the will of the age.

Poets are always ahead of things in a certain way, their sense of language and their vision.

I said, I don't want to paint things like Picasso's women and Matisse's odalisques lying on couches with pillows. I don't want to paint people. I want to paint something I have never seen before. I don't want to make what I'm looking at. I want the fragments.

Some of the most famous books are the least worth reading. Their fame was due to their having done something that needed to be doing in their day. The work is done and the virtue of the book has expired.

Contrary to general belief, an artist is never ahead of his time but most people are far behind theirs.

When a work appears to be ahead of its time, it is only the time that is behind the work.

Take Tom Sachs as an artist. His brain is more brilliant than anything, so of course, anything he puts out over a ten-year period is going to continue to be super relevant. But if you look at some artists, they have one good idea, but unless you know where it's coming from, it's not going to be lasting.

I'm not saying I'm the best. There are many painters in the world. But there is only one Picasso.

Successful artists don't follow trends; they create them.

All art is contemporary art because it had to be made when it was now.

Artists always try to make something that is going to be relevant and up-to-the-minute.

The people I really admire, like William Blake and John Coltrane and Richard Wagner, had these ridiculously full universes that took their entire lives to describe.

Most joyful let the Poet be, it is through him that all men see.

Wit lives in the present, but genius survives the future.

A painter like Picasso, who runs through many periods and phases, ends up by saying all those things which are on the tip of the tongue of the age to say, and finally sterilizes the originality of his contemporaries and juniors.

The poet is he who can write some pure mythology today without the aid of posterity.