Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel Quotes

The writing of a poem is like a child throwing stones into a mineshaft. You compose first, then you listen for the reverberation.

The business of the poet is not to find new emotions, but to use the ordinary ones and, in working them up into poetry, to express feelings which are not in actual emotions at all.

I sometimes talk about the making of a poem within the poem.

If a poet is anybody, he is somebody to whom things made matter very little - somebody who is obsessed by Making.

I always wrote poetry and stuff like that, so putting songs together wasn't that spectacular.

The productions of all arts are kinds of poetry and their craftsmen are all poets.

An author accepting language's invitation to dance steps onto the floor of his her sensibility-charged consciousness and begins to move instinctively--even if with much dread--in ways that synchronize images, ideas, emotions, sounds, smells, ignorance, and knowledge.

You can't write poetry on the computer.

I always say that intuition is the number one tool for an artist.

The best poem is that whose worked-upon unmagical passages come closest, in texture and intensity, to those moments of magical accident.

Poems are always interested in what Ivan Illich called 'shadow work,' not least because that is no small part of their own way of working.

For poetry is, I believe, always an act of the spirit. The poem teaches us something while we make it. The poem makes you as you make the poem, and your making of the poem requires all your capacities of thought, feeling, analysis, and synthesis.

Poetry - poiesis means a thing made.

For poems are not, as people think, simply emotions (one has emotions early enough)-they are experiences.

Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion.

No one is a poet from eight to twelve and from two to six. Whoever is a poet is one always, and continually assaulted by poetry.

the poet like an acrobat climbs on rime to a high wire of his own making.

To be a good poet, you must care more about the writing, than the writer.

for a poet is a light and winged thing, and holy, and never able to compose until he has become inspired, and is beside himself, and reason is no longer in him.

Music is in the air; it's my job to pull it out.

I would still be reading out loud. I think that if you are any kind of an artist, then validation is just sort of... it can be a result, but you're going to do the work anyway. Because you're just wired that way. It's so engrained, it's such a part of your personality that you don't just stop doing it. Eventually I'll retire on some level, eventually no one will want to buy my books or a ticket to see me read, it's inevitable that's going to happe

... imaginary gardens with real toads in them ... ... if you demand on one hand, the raw material of poetry in all its rawness and that which is on the other hand genuine, then you are interested in poetry.

A poem is made up of thoughts, each of which filled the whole sky of the poet in its turn.

I cannot force a design; I do not see this process as being under my conscious control.

When I'm in the studio, I write the music, I play the different instruments, I produce it, I arrange it, and it's a self-indulgent exercise. It's the way I make my music. And when I'm acting, I get to leave myself behind, which is a relief. I get to collaborate with a director; I respect the director's medium and all the actors and actresses. So at the end of the day, it's about a character and it's about a director's vision. It's a really good balance for being so intense and alone in my personal process of making music.