Paul Muldoon Quotes

Everybody who works under any system feels confined. It is a natural reaction. You are confined to a certain extent. You are confined if you work in a bank, if you paint. You are confined, in a sense, to your art - the enclosure of your mind. Everybody should break out.

In all my life, I have never been free. I have never been able to do anything with freedom, except in the field of my writing.

When you put a top on something and try to bottle it, that's when it dies.

If you have rules, you let creativity sleep.

Art chooses its constraints.

Form is burden. Sometimes being part of the system enslaves the mind and greatly limits the imagination by enslaving it to form. Form is a burden to the mind that sees no limits. Form is a prison for the soul who sees possibilities outside the lines and wishes to test them.

To define is to limit.

Of what use were wings to a man fast bound in chains of iron?

I have never in my life walked with a harness. The weight of the tether, makes it feel like I'm dragging an anchor behind me.

There is no privilege in restriction. In other words, I disagree with people who say restriction makes you more creative. I think that's a misleading slogan. I might have been more creative without them than with them.

I don't like any category; categories are not my favorite subject. They're too confining.

Having no choice doesn't result in innovation and performance improvement.

Some rules are there for a reason - but it's one thing to have a rule that protects and another to have rules that stifle.

You will have no sensation of a leash around your neck if you sit by the peg. It is only when you stray that you feel the restraining tug.

A bird on a tether, no matter how long the rope, can always be pulled back.

The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees one

If the bird does like its cage, and does like its sugar and will not leave it, why keep the door so very carefully shut?

It is mediocrity which makes laws and sets mantraps and spring-guns in the realm of free song, saying thus far shalt thou go and no further.

Is it not insupportable to be held down to a canter when you long to gallop for miles?

There is one kind of prison where the man is behind bars, and everything that he desires is outside; and there is another kind where the things are behind the bars, and the man is outside.

I can assure you, that once you get rid of the notion of art, you acquire a great many wonderful new freedoms.

Out of limitations, new forms emerge

I believe that creativity comes from compromise. If you could have everything you ever wanted, it doesn't always work.

Poetry and prison have always been neighbors.

The more complicated and restricted the method, the less opportunity for expression of one's original sense of freedom.