Ian Hamilton Finlay Quotes

Reading a poem aloud to an audience is gestural as much as precise.

Just as the development of earth art and installation art stemmed from the idea of taking art out of the galleries, the basis of my involvement with public art is a continuation of wall drawings.

I consider myself a multi-platform artist - not just a street artist - but the audience I found through street art has created many of the opportunities I now have on other platforms.

Ideally, I'd like to write poetry for public performances and prose for a different, more contemplative kind of consumption.

I had to work out that it was something that could move, without having everybody in spray painted leotards.

If you know what you are going to write when you're writing a poem, it's going to be average.

Every great dance company, even when it seems poised in perfect balance, needs constant renewal of both repertory and performers.

I always saw myself as a multi media artist.

All the best performers bring to their role something more, something different than what the author put on paper. That's what makes theatre live. That's why it persists.

What I want to give in the theatre is beauty, that's what I want to give.

I can't understand Urdu, Bahasa or Russian, but when the Pakistani Faiz, the Indonesian Rendra and the Russian Rosdentvensky declaim, I can feel the living throb of rhythm and music, the warmth and passion of their poetry, as do the hundreds, not a mere roomful, of poetry lovers in the audience.

I mean, I don't know anything else that I would try to do, but it's a very frustrating thing to do, because you are trying to take what's a fantasy in your head and make it live through the minds of 200 people.

I want to photograph what I see and put it in a dramatic context. I'm an actor and a writer, and I want to tell these stories and present these shapes, colors and movements as I see them, as I see them serve a narrative. As I see that narrative serve an audience. That's what I want to do.

What really shifted my understanding of my potential placement in the world of art is when I had a chance to choreograph a show for... It was just this incredible production with all these masters.

Now, to describe the process of the Wrapped Reichstag, which went from 1971 to '95, there is an entire book about that, because each one of our projects has its own book. The book is not an art book, meaning it's not written by an art historian.

I used to stand on the corner in San Diego with poems sticking out of my hip pocket, asking people if there was a place where I could read poems. The audience is half of the poem.

I never called my work an 'art'. It's part of show business, the business of building entertainment.

I think that concrete poetry seems to have, as far as I can see, come to a kind of a dead end. It doesn't seem to be going any further than it went in its high period of about five or six years ago.

I am not a performer but occasionally I deliberately work in a public context. Some sculptures need the movement of people around them to work.

I'm pretty much all for poetry in public places - poetry on buses, poetry on subways, on billboards, on cereal boxes.

I totally understand that I am a little outrageous in some ways... I'm a little un-P.C., but I really wish I had the chance to perform for the American fans.

The only reason for doing a play is to make a statement about it, and by that I don't mean a conceit of the producer.

I'm doing the kind of show that I would want to see.

In my theater, I'm not trying to change the world.

Most theater tells you what to think.