Jonathan Dee Quotes

Literature must rest always on a principle, and temporal considerations are no principle at all. For, to the poet, all times and places are one; the stuff he deals with is eternal and eternally the same: no theme is inept, no past or present preferable.

A truly great book should be read in youth, again in maturity and once more in old age, as a fine building should be seen by morning light, at noon and by moonlight.

Music is such a great communicator. It breaks down linguistic barriers, cultural barriers, it basically reaches out. That's when rock n' roll succeeds, and that's what virtuosity is all about.

To photograph is to hold one's breath, when all faculties converge to capture fleeting reality. It's at that precise moment that mastering an image becomes a great physical and intellectual joy.

All the great novels, all the great films, all the great dramas are fictions that actually tell us the truth about us or about human nature or about human situations without being tied into the minutia of documentary events. Otherwise we might as well just make documentaries.

I think that emotion and good stories can cross the times.

Observe that it is a great error to believe that all mediums of art are not closely tied to their time.

As any student of literature knows, the books that last are often not the books that are most popular when they are written. Both 'Moby Dick' and 'The Great Gatsby' were complete failures, critically and commercially, when they first appeared.

I just love what art can do and what it means for us; that it can cross barriers. It can speak to us across space and time and culture.

Art connects everyone.

All culture, all important culture, is always linked to how people express and experience being alive.

The poet is always our contemporary.

Classic literature is still something that hangs in the air like a song.

All the world can be found in poetry. All you need to see and hear. All the moments, good and bad, joyous and sad.

Books hold no passports. There's only one true literary tradition: the human.

What's wonderful about Tolkien and Shakespeare is that they show up your own individual microscope. They're so infinitely vast. You can reinterpret them in so many ways. Each age will have its own resonance with Lord of the Rings.

the great novels have marched with the years. They are the contemporaries of time.

The power of art is that it can connect us to one another, and to larger truths about what it means to be alive and what it means to be human.

Art establishes the basic human truths which must serve as the touchstone of our judgement.

Poetry reminds us of the truths about life and human nature that we knew all along, but forgot somehow because they weren't yet in memorable language.

As poetry is the highest speech of man, it can not only accept and contain, but in the end express best everything in the world, or in himself, that he discovers. It will absorb and transmute, as it always has done, and glorify, all that we can know. This has always been, and always will be, poetry's office.

All the stories I have told you are finally as useless as all ancient knowledge is to man and to us. Its images and its poetry can be beautiful; it can make us shiver with the recognition of things we have always suspected or felt. It can draw us back to times when the earth was new to man, and wondrous. But always we come back to the way the earth is now.

The future of poetry is immense, because in poetry, where it is worthy of its high destinies, our race, as time goes on, will find an ever surer and surer stay ... More and more mankind will discover that we have to turn to poetry to interpret life for us, to console us, to sustain us.

And all of these writers offer me a greater understanding of what it is to be alive, and that is such an incredible thing art can do for other people. It made me want to try and get close to this strange, mysterious thing that people can do with words.

One must believe that private dilemmas are, if deeply examined, universal, and so, if expressed, have a human value beyond the private, and one must also believe in the vehicle for expressing them, in the talent.