Doris Humphrey Quotes

An art which isn't based on feeling isn't an art at all.

Words are the children of reason and, therefore, can't explain it. They really can't translate feeling because they're not part of it. That's why it bugs me when people try to analyze jazz as an intellectual theorem. It's not. It's feeling.

It is not enough to know your craft - you have to have feeling. Science is all very well, but for us imagination is worth far more.

Rationalism is the enemy of art, though necessary as a basis for architecture.

Music comes from a place we don't know.

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

If you're singing, you're telling a story. So to tell it and tell it right, that's it.

The moment you cheat for the sake of beauty, you know you're an artist.

Reason is a fine thing, but it is not the only thing available to a writer. It's just part of the arsenal of many things available to a storyteller. Revelation, for example.

Music is not simply an orchestration of something, but it's also not something as trivial as honesty.

What we ask of music, first and last, is that it communicate experience - experience of all kinds, vital and profound at its greatest, amusing or entertaining at another level.

For a creative writer possession of the 'truth' is less important than emotional sincerity.

A poet never takes notes. You never take notes in a love affair.

When truth has no burning, then it is philosophy, when it gets burning from the heart, it becomes poetry.

Music is the shorthand of emotion.

You wind up creating from silence, like painting a picture on a blank canvas that could bring tears to somebody's eyes. As songwriters, our blank canvas is silence. Then we write a song from an idea that can change somebody's life. Songwriting is the closest thing to magic that we could ever experience. That's why I love songwriting.

Art is more engaging that propaganda.

Language is a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, while all the time we long to move the stars to pity.

What's most important in animation is the emotions and the ideas being portrayed. I'm a great believer of energy and emotion.

The main factor in any form of creativeness is the life of a human spirit, that of the actor and his part, their joint feelings and subconscious creation.

Somebody informed me recently that the key to every art, from writing to gardening to sculpture, is creativity. I beg to differ.

I was always drawing eyes, even as a child. Eyes fascinated me.

To say the word Romanticism is to say modern art - that is, intimacy, spirituality, color, aspiration towards the infinite, expressed by every means available to the arts.

Neither a lofty degree of intelligence nor imagination nor both together go to the making of genius. Love, love, love, that is the soul of genius.

The more life you have, the more it's in your pores, the more able you are to be creative as an artist.