Guy Davenport Quotes

The purpose of arts education is not to produce more artists, though that is a byproduct. The real purpose of arts education is to create complete human beings capable of leading successful and productive lives in a free society.

Money is everywhere but so is poetry. What we lack are the poets.

The idea that myth is the opposite of knowledge, or the opposite of truth, is simply to disallow it. It is like saying poetry is the opposite of truth.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti had a tremendous education as an artist and also an enormous knowledge of literarture.

Science is for those who learn, poetry is for those who know.

Books are the money of Literature, but only the counters of Science.

It is the supreme art of the teacher to awaken joy in creative expression and knowledge.

My father's a preacher, my mother's a teacher, thus I rhyme.

In our part of the world and in Ottoman culture a poet is a great person, an almost holy person through whom God speaks.

All honor to the noble women that have devoted earnest lives to the intellectual needs of mankind!

To work in a treadmill all one's life, to wear oneself to the bone all one's days, is not conducive to the outflowering of genius. If we desire a real crop of great art, great poetry, great thinking, we must provide the proper conditions.

Anything that brings people to see Shakespeare is fine by me. He's the great humanist.

I still hope that more people can create art, even though artistic genres may never be the most popular or money-making genres. But the thing is, I think art is more long-lasting. It stays in people, and it changes them.

Poetry is the first and last of all knowledge - it is as immortal as the heart of man.

poetry is the breath and finer spirit of knowledge

Any work of art that can be understood is the product of journalism. The rest, called literature, is a dossier of human imbecility for the guidance of future professors.

Most wretched men Are cradled into poetry by wrong: They learn in suffering what they teach in song.

What are books but folly, and what is an education but an arrant hypocrisy, and what is art but a curse when they touch not the heart and impel it not to action?

When I'm working, on stage, entertaining people, or watching someone do something amazing, it inspires me to be the best artist that I can be. I enjoy being around art - whether it be a museum, a Broadway show - or even writing a poem. Those are things that make me feel alive and inspire me.

Art is not to be taught in Academies. It is what one looks at, not what one listens to, that makes the artist. The real schools should be the streets.

To me Art (poetry) is a continuous and continuing process and that when a man fails to write good poetry he fails to live fully or well.

[Shahrazad] had perused the books, annals and legends of preceding Kings, and the stories, examples and instances of by gone men and things; indeed it was said that she had collected a thousand books of histories relating to antique races and departed rulers. She had perused the works of the poets and knew them by heart; she had studied philosophy and the sciences, arts and accomplishments; and she was pleasant and polite, wise and witty, well read and well bred.

A lot of time when I'm creating songs, they're in real time. When I'm writing the song, I feel what I'm feeling for its full potential. As soon as the song is over, I'm like, I created art.

I love the fact publishers are still publishing unprofitable material. It's a challenge to the powers that be. It's saying there is a real literature in this country and we will keep publishing it.