Cecil Taylor Quotes

I have tried, in all the ways I can, to make timeless music.

When you write a song, a song has longevity.

At some point in my life, before I was gone, I wanted to make an album, even if it was for no reason other than posterity.

I don't think anybody is a poet 24/7, only in those rare moments when a person is producing a poem.

There comes a point when you can more or less count the number of books you're going to write before you die.

It's absolutely crucial to maintain my life as a poet.

But you'd have a job to find many of my poems which would seem to be very influenced by a particular person.

You've just gotta go in and write from the heart and write the best material that you can and put it out. If one hits, hey, great. It keeps the legacy going. But you've gotta keep doing new material. It's the future of any band.

There are things which some people never attempt during their whole lives, but one of these is not poetry. Poetry attacks all human beings sooner or later, and, like the measles, is mild or violent according to the age of the sufferer.

To be a poet did not occur to me. It was indeed a threshold guarded by demons.

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

I always turn to Frank O'Hara and David Berman's 'Actual Air,' which came out in 1999. He's a poet I haven't tired of.

'Finally' actually started out as a poem. I always wrote poetry, and pretty soon I figured out that if I could write poems, I could write songs.

I wanted to be a poet. I wrote from ages 15 to 22, but I left it because I discovered, and fell in love with, cinema.

I had a million jobs before I managed to make a living out of poetry.

I've written poetry most of my life.

Queen Latifah was writing poetry. Maybe Latifah's 'Ladies First' and Angelou's 'Phenomenal Woman' are the same thing, a generation apart.

When I was about 11 years old, I wrote a song with my dad. Then in high school I started more writing.

Whether I'm writing scripts or prose, the goal is identical. To give pleasure. Now whether I succeed or not is up for debate, and, mostly, I fail. But I try. I like to make things. It's a way to stay busy during one's ephemeral and confusing life.

Poetry is a plan for a slit in the face of a bronze fountain goat and the path of fresh drinking water.

You have to give up a great deal of life, your personal life, to be a writer.

If you're writing, you're a writer. If you're talking about it or thinking about it, I'm not so sure. Writing is ninety-eight percent work and two percent magic.

Poetry is creative expression; Prose is constructive expression... by creative I mean original. In Poetry the words are born or reborn in the act of thinking... There is no time interval between the words and the thought when a real poet writes, both of them happen together, and both the thought and the word are Poetry.

I have always felt like an artist when I work on a book. I see no reason why the word should always be confined to writers of fiction and poetry.