Yevgeny Yevtushenko Quotes

Poetry's role is to provide spontaneous individual candor as distinct from manipulation and brainwash.

The freedom of poetic license.

The poet is a madman lost in adventure.

The great poets have sympathized with the people. They have uttered in all ages the human cry. Unbought by gold, unawed by power, they have lifted high the torch that illuminates the world.

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

The death of a beautiful woman, is unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world.

And at least in poetry you should feel free to lie. That is, not to lie, but to imagine what you want, to follow the direction of the poem.

But poets were not considered dangerous and they were advised to exercise self-censorship. At most, poets were requested not to write at all. I took advantage of this negative liberty.

'Therefore' is a word the poet must not know.

I went to the Lake District to see what kind of a country it could be that would produce a Wordsworth.

We have a motto at Naropa: 'Keep the world safe for poetry.' It's humorous but has some real bite to it. If the world is safe for poetry, it can be safe for many other things.

We didn't say, 'Hey, we're gonna pick a bunch of cover songs,' or, 'We're gonna write an original song that has to sound like this, because we're a metal band, so we're gonna cover some metal songs.' We did the opposite. We just said, 'We're gonna have fun with these songs, and we're gonna try different things.'

Jazz is something that's constantly changing. Its sole purpose is to let people improvise, to let them solo differently each time they play. And that's always been what I like best.

I do one take; I never overdubbed twice. I know there's stuff that isn't perfect, but it doesn't matter: Nothing is perfect, and there is a magic there that is undeniable because of the fact that we don't care about those things.

It will never be perfect, but perfect is overrated. Perfect is boring on live TV.

I don't like records that are the same from beginning to end, that are too styled and slick. Everything is so designed and airbrushed and Botoxed, it makes us think, 'Oh, everybody's perfect except me. Everything's smooth except me.' But nothing is smooth.

And I say also this. I do not think the forest would be so bright, nor the water so warm, nor love so sweet, if there were no danger in the lakes.

I think it was rather an advantage not having any living poets in England or America in whom one took any particular interest. I don't know what it would be like but I think it would be a rather troublesome distraction to have such a lot of dominating presences, as you call them, about. Fortunately we weren't bothered by each other.

I always wanted the actors to feel really free to leave the words behind if they weren't working, reword lines, if they felt like there was impulse they wanted to follow, if it was taking the scene out of order or adding something, that you should always feel free to do that.

A Poem should be palpable and mute As a globed fruit.

In contrast to a dream a reverie cannot be recounted. To be communicated, it must be written, written with emotion and taste, being relived all the more strongly because it is being written down. Here, we are touching the realm of written love. It is going out of fashion, but the benefits remain. There are still souls for whom love is the contact of two poetries, the fusion of two reveries.

Every limited mind demands a certain freedom of expression, and the man who cannot express himself satisfactorily without the stimulation derived from the spirited mode of two centuries ago should certainly be permitted to follow without undue restraint a practice so harmless, so free from essential error, and so sanctioned by precedent, as that of employing in his poetical compositions the smooth and inoffensive allowable rhyme.

I wandered lonely as a cloud That floats on high o'er vales and hills When all at once I saw a crowd A host of golden daffodils Beside the lake beneath the trees Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.