Peter Sotos Quotes

By the time I was 9, I had the conviction that everybody in the world was an artist except plumbers or people who delivered groceries.

I like being involved in interesting and creative things. I'd just rather be involved in creating it, rather than being in it.

I like men who paint or write or do something creative.

There is a general knowledge that I am multi-dimensional, that when you are creative you do a lot of things.

I would like to be known as an 'artist'. Whether that be music, acting, sketching, cooking, whatever. I'm interested in all of those things.

I like to have a lot of different creative outlets.

About five years old, I was drawing self-portraits with the brown crayon instead of the peach crayon and, you know, the black curly hair. That's how I was portraying myself.

People who aren't artists don't think about creativity and art; they think about money.

Music is my greatest love. It is also my first love. But I love a lot of things, including painting, drawing, writing, designing, and more.

[To become a poet] The most important thing is to pay attention. The next would probably be to read; it's so important to pay attention. It keeps you from being bored, and I might add it keeps you from being boorish.

There is creation in the eye.

I feel like pop stars can't be rock stars anymore because they have to be role models, and it takes the fun out of it for us, because we just want to have fun with art.

Grass probably helped me as much as it hurt me. Especially as a performer. When you're high, it's easy to kid yourself about how clever certain mediocre pieces of material are. But, on the other hand, pot opens windows and doors that you may not be able to get through any other way.

Poetry expands the senses and keeps them in prime condition. It keeps you aware of your nose, your eye, your ear, your tongue, your hand.

If we want to make meaning, we need to make art. Cook, write, draw, doodle, paint, scrapbook, take pictures, collage, knit, rebuild an engine, sculpt, dance, decorate, act, sing - it doesn't matter. As long as we're creating, we're cultivating meaning.

The musings are the same I believe the fire to create burns so heavily that I am never far from a guitar or a fountain pen.

Art flies around truth, but with the definite intention of not getting burnt. Its capacity lies in finding in the dark void a place where the beam of light can be intensely caught, without this having been perceptible before.

Those people who recognise that imagination is reality's master, we call sages, and those who act upon it, we call artists.

Reality is a cliché from which we escape by metaphor.

If there’s a thing, a scene, maybe, an image that you want to see real bad, that you need to see but it doesn’t exist in the world around you, at least not in the form that you envision, then you create it so that you can look at it and have it around, or show it to other people who wouldn’t have imagined it because they perceive reality in a more narrow, predictable way. And that’s it. That’s all an artist does.

for what is the gift of the poet and the artist except to see the sights which others cannot see and to hear the sounds that others cannot hear?

Art is born in attention.

Whatever colors you have in your mind, I'll show them to you and you'll see them shine.

Art comes from everywhere. It's your response to your surroundings.

People see me as pretty low key in a lot of ways. And for me, like, even choosing to be John Legend and to be who I am as a star, as an artist, it's a risk 'cause I - you know, I graduated from college and worked as a management consultant, and I could have had this very kind of buttoned-up life and worn suits to work every day.