John Milton Quotes

I should like to present myself to the young painters of the year 2000 with the wings of a butterfly.

The poet will not be satisfied with recording, the poet will have to transform.

I hope I will always have the ability to create art and live in a world where I can speak freely, and I can inspire people. I don't know what form that will take.

Imagination in poetry, as distinguished from mere fancy is the transfiguring of the real or actual to the ideal.

The particulars of life do not matter to the artist; they merely provide him with the opportunity to lay bare his genius.

Poetry is the morning dream of great minds.

Poetry is a whim of Nature in her lighter moods; it requires nothing but its own madness and, lacking that, it becomes a soundless cymbal, a belfry without a bell.

Poetry cannot breathe in the scholar's atmosphere.

Th' embroid'ry of poetic dreams.

A great poet, a really great poet, is the most unpoetical of all creatures. But inferior poets are absolutely fascinating.

What is an artistic picture? An artistic picture is very simple. The creator is not the producer. The creator is not the star. The creator is the director, the person who realizes the picture, like a poet, like an artist. The creator of the picture is free to do whatever he wants, how he wants to do it. That is an artistic picture.

The poet, like the lover, is a menace on the assembly line.

I cannot copy nature in a servile way; I am forced to interpret nature and submit it to the spirit of the picture. From the relationship I have found in all the tones there must result a living harmony of colors, a harmony analogous to that of a musical composition.

Even if you're a poet sitting in your room writing a poem, you're still in the world - although I guess being a poet is a different than having to deal with 40 or 50 people to raise a couple million bucks and all that bullshit.

Writing poetry is a state of free float.

He is exactly the poem I wanted to write.

To walk with nature as a poet is the necessary condition of a perfect artist.

Now begins to rise in me the familiar rhythm; words that have lain dormant now lift, now toss their crests, and fall and rise, and falls again. I am a poet, yes. Surely I am a great poet.

The void yields up nothing. You have to be a great poet to make it ring.

We should nourish our souls on the dew of Poesy, and manure them as well.

When I think of anything properly describable as a beautiful idea, it is always in the form of music. I have written and printed probably 10,000,000 words in English but all the same I shall die an inarticulate man, for my best ideas beset me in a language I know only vaguely and speak only as a child.

The hallmark of an artist is generosity.

The stuff of which masterpieces are made drifts about the world waiting to be clothed in words.

The present is never poetic as it serves necessity, necessity, however, is prosaic.