Gabriela Mistral Quotes

If you're not an actor, or if you're any other kind of artist, there's this sense that, "I must express this thing." Why make a painting if you don't feel like you have to for something inside of yourself? Why make a song if you don't feel like you have to because there's something that you need to get out? And when you're an actor and you're not performing text that you've written, I think there's this bizarre disconnect with the must-ness of it.

I love to read poetry but I haven't written anything that I'm willing to show anybody.

No, I think that a person writes a poem because they have an inner urge of something that they want to express, and I think it's that inner urge that you want to express when you write a piece of music.

My intention is to write poems. That's what I've been doing most of my life.

That's another pompous expression that is out of fashion, to say that poetry is a gift. It sounds pompous because you say, 'Who gave you the gift, and what is this gift?' And the gift is where I am; the gift is what I have come out of, the people around me who, I think, are beautiful people.

The best poems come from the world, go through the poet, and go back in to the world.

I always knew that was what I wanted to do - to write, particularly poetry.

People who are artists professionally are not artists because they want to be artists; they have to be artists. They're compelled to get that creativity out and to share that with others.

Artists are controlled by the life that beats in them, like the ocean beats on the shore.

Empires fall, ids explode, great symphonies are written, and behind all of it is a single instinct that demands satisfaction.

The poets are nothing but interpreters of the gods, each one possessed by the divinity to whom he is in bondage.

For me, a poet is someone who is 'in contact.' Someone through whom a current is passing.

Actually, when I write, there is a feeling of necessity, of something that is stronger than myself that demands that I must write as I write.

Formerly I believed books were made like this: a poet came, lightly opened his lips, and the inspired fool burst into song – if you please! But it seems, before they can launch a song, poets must tramp for days with callused feet, and the sluggish fish of the imagination flounders softly in the slush of the heart. And while, with twittering rhymes, they boil a broth of loves and nightingales, the tongueless street merely writhes for lack of something to shout or say

Our poets are men of talents who sing, and not the children of music.

I always wonder what drives us as Artists.

All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling. To be natural is to be obvious, and to be obvious is to be inartistic.

Art is a kind of innate drive that seizes a human being and makes him its instrument.

Once a year I try writing a poem, usually because I've read some poetry that amazed me and I want to do that.

You will taste a way of life profoundly nourishing and from your tongue may spring a song or poem or sentence or word or maybe nothing but silence. Silence only the heart can turn to song.

The poetry and the songs that you are suppose to write, I believe are in your heart. You just have to open up your heart and not be afraid to get them out.

The poet is a creator, not an iconoclast, and never will tamely endeavor to say in prose what can only be expressed in song.

Perhaps, it is just as well to be rash and foolish for a while. If writers were too wise, perhaps no books would be written at all. It might be better to ask yourself "Why?" afterwards than before. Anyway, the force from somewhere in Space which commands you to write in the first place, gives you no choice. You take up the pen when you are told, and write what is commanded. There is no agony like bearing an untold story inside you.

Add to this cruelly delicate organism the overpowering necessity to create, create, create - so that without the creating of music or poetry or books or buildings or something of meaning, his very breath is cut off from him. He must create, must pour out creation. By some strange, unknown, inward urgency he is not really alive unless he is creating.

There's this pet phrase about writing that is bandied around particularly in workshops about "finding your own voice as a poet", which I suppose means that you come out from under the direct influence of other poets and have perhaps found a way to combine those influences so that it appears to be your own voice.