Patti Smith Quotes

Poems come from incomplete knowledge.

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.

Philip Larkin didn't write for several years before his life ended. And when he was asked why he didn't write, he said the muse deserted him. And when I read that, it really had a profound effect upon me, sort of scared me. So that's why I think I have no right to assume that some thought is going to come... But I think, in my imagination, if it is it, there will probably be something else I'm interested in.

When I'm most deeply involved in my writing, sometimes I do dream about poetry, and occasionally I wake up from a dream with a phrase that I like well enough to put it in a poem.

Everyone has a story, the air is full of stories. The creative process is mysterious, I don't know why it is that suddenly a theme will take hold of me and refuse to leave me in peace until I investigate it and write it.

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.

You think you photograph a particular scene for the pleasure it gives. In fact it's the scene that wants to be photographed. You're merely an extra in the production.

The poet is he who inspires, rather than he who is inspired.

The creative act amazes me. Whether it's poetry, whether it's music, it's an amazing process, and it has something to do with bringing forth the old out into the world to create and to bring forth that which will rejuvenate.

So much of what we do as artists is a combination of personal experience and imagination, and how that all creeps into your work is not so linear.

Yes, I do often write poems from the mind, but I hope I don't ignore feelings and emotions.

There is a kind of mysticism to writing.

The poet doesn't invent. He listens.

I probably get a deeper satisfaction of having taken a very good photograph than of having written something very good, a very good story. Maybe it's because the element of magic is so present in a good photograph - luck and magic, but also hard work and being ready and all that.

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

In a lot of ways, the cool thing about modeling is that other people and artists I look up to are able to project their artistic visions onto me, and it was really exciting to be a muse in that way and carry out a vision.

Life and art are inseparable.

A lot of my songs are inspired by a muse of some sort, whether she's real or not.

I wake up from dreams and go, 'Wow, put this down on paper'. The whole thing is strange. You hear the words, everything is right there in front of your face.

Whenever I get lost in a novel I just throw a poem in. What it does is flare up, and it's so illuminated that I'm able to see where to go. I write between these illuminations.

I’m only able to write poetry, for the most part, when I have a Muse, a woman who focuses the world for me.

I found the poems in the fields And only wrote them down

Sometimes humans hit on a moment of profundity more complete than their dim minds could comprehend, and they took that nugget of truth and dumped it in the refuse for the bards and the poets to find, and mangle into yodeling paeans of love.

They wanted to come in after the pounds", explained Pooh, "so I let them. It's the best way to write poetry, letting things come.

The muse whispers to you when she chooses, and you can't tell her to come back later, because you quickly learn in this business that she might not come back at all.