Glenn Ligon Quotes

Writing chases after the senses, and conveys them in an altered form. When it is done well, the senses come alive in a new and captured form.

Filming is so much to do with rhythm, as is music, and if it isn't there then you know in the end nobody can save it really, they can't.

Poetry is rather an approach to things, to life, than it is typographical production.

Poetry is a type-font design for an alphabet of fun, hate, love, death.

Music is the reaching out towards the utmost realities by means of ordered sound.

Now this is very profound, what rhythm is, and goes far deeper than words. A sight, an emotion, creates this wave in the mind, long before it makes words to fit it.

Often while reading a book one feels that the author wouold heave preferred to paint rather than to wirte; one can sense the pleasure he derives from describing a landscape or a person, as if he were painting what he is saying, because deep in his heart he would have preferred to use brushes and colors.

What will they say about my poetry who never touched my blood?

The job of taste was to thin the insane torrent of human creativity down to manageable levels. But the job of appetite was never to be happy with taste.

We may call painting the grandchild of nature.

Poetry is a kind of ingenious nonsense.

Do you know that drawing with words is also an art... ?

Poetry is a sort of truancy, a dream within the dream of life, a wild flower planted among our wheat.

That's what I mean by something grips in a canvas. The moment that happens you are then sucked into the whole thing. Like some kind of rhythm.

Poetry is a dissociating and anarchic force which through analogy, associations and imagery, thrives on the destruction of known relationships.

Reading is a majority skill but a minority art.

Poetry expands the senses and keeps them in prime condition. It keeps you aware of your nose, your eye, your ear, your tongue, your hand.

A novel is like a bow, and the violin that produces the sound is the reader's soul.

Poetry has been the guardian angel of humanity in all ages.

Poetry will absorb and transmute, as it always has done, and glorify, all that we can know.

Reading [poetry], you know, is rather like opening the door to a horde of rebels who swarm out attacking one in twenty places at once - hit, roused, scraped, bared, swung through the air, so that life seems to flash by; then again blinded, knocked on the head - all of which are agreeable sensations for a reader (since nothing is more dismal than to open the door and get no response).

A half finished shawl left on the coffee table isn't a mess; it's an object of art.

Music contains a whole gamut of experience, from sensuous elements to ultimate intellectual harmonies.

Beauty makes one lose one's head. Poetry is born of this decapitation

Art has a unique capacity to take one or other facet of the message and translate it into colors, shapes and sounds which nourish the intuition of those who look and listen.