Czeslaw Milosz Quotes

Maybe the example of Southern fiction writing has been so powerful that Southern poets have sort of keyed themselves to that.

The poets of each generation seldom sing a new song. They turn to themes men always have loved, and sing them in the mode of their times.

I wanted to tell a romantic and dark side of Ottoman history that was also slightly political, saying to the previous generation of writers, 'Look, I'm interested in Ottoman things, and I'm not afraid of it, and I'm doing something creative.'

Without tradition, art is a flock of sheep without a shepherd. Without innovation, it is a corpse.

Fashion is only the attempt to realize art in living forms and social intercourse.

The fact is that all writers create their precursors. Their work modifies our conception of the past, just as it is bound to modify the future.

No heirloom of humankind captures the past as do art and language.

Like Love, Art ties together all the great sacred traditions because they all used creative expression, or we wouldn't know about them.

When I was young, I struggled with authorship: with everything the word meant and failed to mean. Irish poetry was heavy with custom. Sometimes at night, when I tried to write, a ghost hand seemed to hold mine. Where could my life, my language fit in?

Queen Latifah was writing poetry. Maybe Latifah's 'Ladies First' and Angelou's 'Phenomenal Woman' are the same thing, a generation apart.

The poet needs a ground in popular tradition on which he may work, and which, again, may restrain his art within the due temperance. It holds him to the people, supplies a foundation for his edifice; and, in furnishing so much work done to his hand, leaves him at leisure, and in full strength for the audacities of his imagination.

What makes a good work of art is something that honors certain traditions and breaks with others.

To be an Irish poet after that 19th century in which there was such a struggle toward the light, I think still will always be in the hearts of the writers of my generation and the generations before and hopefully the generations after.

To me the pain and the blood are merely means of artistic expression.

I think that painting is a very ancient form of expression.

I am particularly conscious of my connection to the poets of the Harlem Renaissance because I, too, am a Black poet, born into, and shaped by, the very community in which those poets of the past produced so much of the work we associate with the Harlem Renaissance. We speak from the same place, both literally and metaphorically.

If the United States haven't grown poets, on any scale of grandeur, it is certain that they import, print, and read more poetry than any equal number of people elsewhere -- probably more than the rest of the world combined. Poetry (like a grand personality) is a growth of many generations -- many rare combinations. To have great poets, there must be great audiences too.

And when you are entering into poetry, whatever stage you're at, you are participating in something with a very long and noble tradition.

Style is the answer to everything. A fresh way to approach a dull or dangerous thing. To do a dull thing with style is preferable to doing a dangerous thing without it. To do a dangerous thing with style is what I call art.

Whenever serious art loses track of its roots in the vernacular, then it begins to atrophy.

I'm a sponge, the more I absorb, the more I am able to articulate my vision, as artists do, like Picasso. I'm an artist in that light. I went from being an artist to an artiste.

I've changed my style constantly, so I'm not sure I have one defined style, except perhaps style of subject matter. But you learn as you go, I suppose.

I used to teach on a college level, and I've taught in schools where kids just wanted to be artists, and I used to be furious with them if they didn't read, because they just seemed so - their education seemed so thin if all they could do was pick up a paint-loaded brush and fling it at a canvas. I mean, there was nothing to express there, except maybe their own personal feelings. But if they're not - if they don't have a grounding in the way these things have been expressed by other people down through the centuries, then they're lost.

The artist is the person who invents the means to bridge between biological inheritance and the environments created by technological innovation.

Literature and the arts are also criticism in a more particular and practical sense. They embody an expository reflection on, a value judgement of, the inheritance and context to which they pertain.