Sylvia Plath Quotes

As a poet I would say everything should be able to come into a poem but I can't put toothbrushes in a poem. I really can't.

A poem is never finished, only abandoned.

I just sit down and write. I never know when. The most recent one is 'Sarah Still,' which is about our life, Sarah and me. It's my favorite of all my poems.

I'm finding that writing poetry is strengthening my songwriting, because you're learning to make a piece of writing work on a page with nothing else. I was also finding within poetry I felt a lot more free to write about very different matters, to write about social issues or things that are going on around me.

It's easier and sociabler to talk technique than it is to make art.

It's harder to make something good when you can't curse all the time.

Nothing has a more sinister effect on art than the artist's desire to prove that he's good. The terrible temptation of idealism! You must achieve mastery over your idealism, over your virtue as well as over your vice, aesthetic mastery over everything that drives you to write in the first place - your outrage, your politics, your grief, your love!

I have heard painters acknowledge, though in that acknowledgment no degradation of themselves was intended, that they could do better without nature than with her; or as they express themselves, 'that it only put them out.

I prefer the absurdity of writing poems to the absurdity of not writing poems.

Writing poetry is a state of free float.

When I look at nature I feel as if I'll be able to paint it all, note it all down, and then you might as well forget it once you're working.

Then you learn about composition, you learn about old masters, you form certain ideas about structure. But the inhuman activity of trying to make some kind of jump or leap, where , the painting is always saying, 'What do you want from me? I can only be a painting.' You have to go from part to part, but you shouldn't see yourself go from part to part, that's the whole point.

A poem begins with a lump in the throat; a homesickness or a love sickness. It is a reaching-out toward expression; an effort to find fulfillment. A complete poem is one where an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words.

Every poet, be his outward lot what it may, finds himself born in the midst of prose; h e has to struggle from the littleness and obstruction of an actual world into the freedom and infinitude of an ideal.

A work in progress quickly becomes feral. It reverts to a wild state overnight. It is barely domesticated, a mustang on which you one day fastened a halter, but which now you cannot catch. It is a lion you cage in your study. As the work grows, it gets harder to control; it is a lion growing in strength. You must visit it every day and reassert your mastery over it. If you skip a day, you are, quite rightly, afraid to open the door to its room. You enter its room with bravura, holding a chair at the thing and shouting, "Simba!

writing is the loneliest job in the world. There's always that frustrating chasm to bridge between the concept and the writing of it. We're a harassed tribe, we writers.

You can't control life. It doesn't wind up perfectly. Only-only art you can control. Art and masturbation. Two areas in which I am an absolute expert.

The true poem is the poet's mind.

The live show allows me to transcend myself, because it's not about me anymore. The writing process is very much about me but then the live show is not. They feel really different.

I'm a painter, I'm an artist. I take things too far sometimes. I really need some comfort.

I want painting to be difficult to do.

I feel like finding the balance is the struggle with making music in general.

The director’s task is to recreate life, its movement, its contradictions, its dynamic and conflicts. It is his duty to reveal every iota of the truth he has seen, even if not everyone finds that truth acceptable. Of course an artist can lose his way, but even his mistakes are interesting provided they are sincere. For they represent the reality of his inner life, of the peregrinations and struggle into which the external world has thrown him.

Sometimes I make films about scenes other filmmakers would leave out, so I just make the film out of all the things they wouldn't put in. Poetry allows you to do this more than prose, for example.

Different themes inevitably require different methods of expression. This does not imply either evolution or progress; it is a matter of following the idea one wants to express and the way in which one wants to express it.