Walt Whitman Quotes

Poetry is fascinating. As soon as it begins the poetry has changed the thing into something extra, and somehow prose can go over into poetry.

You see Michelangelo and Picasso and you read literature. I had some innate inchoate yearning for that, but I never really saw where I would fit in. That's called art. And then something happened to pop music, which is that it became art under the hand of the Beatles, the Stones, and Bob Dylan and some other people.

No longer shall I paint interiors with men reading and women knitting. I will paint living people who breathe and feel and suffer and love.

The image of the band has always been something that's evolved or changed with every record cycle that we've done. I think, in a lot of respects, that's because we were so interested in having a visual representation for the music that we were making.

Die Kunst ist ewig, ihre Formen wandeln sich. (The art is eternal, their shapes are changing.)

The act of writing is an act of optimism. You would not take the trouble to do it if you felt that it didn't matter.

If modern art has produced symbols that are unfamiliar, that was only to be expected.

Art is alive because it is mortal.

The world of art is not a world of immortality but of metamorphosis.

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.

In the end, we're just showmen. But, I think that it's an important factor. Not to be anything else but clear about that - for me, creativity is an important part of our evolution. Art has probably done more good for the world than war. But they're equally powerful. They both create revolutions.

The invention of photography has dealt a mortal blow to the old modes of expression, in painting as well as in poetry, where automatic writing, which appeared at the end of the nineteenth century, is a true photography of thought. Since a blind instrument now assured artists of achieving the aim they had set themselves up to that time, they now aspired, not without recklessness, to break with the imitation of appearances.

Writing is making sense of life.

The point of art is that it always has the necessity to expand because people are inherently expanding.

I write in order to belong.

Music makes me come alive. I love to sing and dance! Watching a great movie with a great message.

I think each album does have a different energy, otherwise you'd be doing the same thing again and not experimenting anew... Albums are such autobiographical material, not in the material but as an expression of what you're like at the time.

Art need no longer be an account of past sensations.

I sense a real difference in my work from the time I was younger and single and more involved in the world of music and going out to bars and all that. There were points at which I was trying to use my art to reflect positively on myself, to almost be flirtatious through the work.

I just went to Europe, spent a year traveling, and then I came home with a finished album and said, "Hey everyone I'm back!" I gave everyone their lighters from Luxembourg, gave them the postcards from Italy and Rome, then said, "Hey look, I made a record, too" and played it for them. The general reaction was shock, because it was so different from what they've known me to do.

Every poet depends upon generations who wrote in his native tongue; he inherits styles and forms elaborated by those who lived before him. At the same time, though, he feels that those old means of expression are not adequate to his own experience.

My opinion is that new needs need new techniques. And the modern artists have found new ways and new means of making their statements.

The purpose of art ... is not to reflect life but to organize it, to build it.

Art is like ham-it nourishes people.

I made a conscious decision to take my life and career in a different direction. I started working on a play, and also, by attending Burning Man for several years, I was incredibly stimulated by the art there. I increasingly wanted to be a part of it, and focused on what I wanted to say as an artist.