John Clare Quotes

I sometimes find it half a sin, To put to words the grief i feel, For words like nature,half reveal, and half conceal the soul within.

I think any music of any worth has been done by people who were very interested in the internal process of their soul and their mind that's taking place while they're writing music.

Poems are a hotline to our hearts, and we forget this emotional power at our peril

In a word, poetry can not exist without emotion, or, if you will, without a movement of the soul which regulates the words.

How can the word love, the word life, even fit in the mouth?

It's not a matter of old or new forms; a person writes without thinking about any forms, he writes because it flows freely from his soul.

The soul is like a violin string: it makes music only when it is stretched.

Writing does not resurrect. It buries.

The eye-is it not the mirror of the soul in all living creatures?

You can't write poetry on the computer.

Poems' deep work is a matter of language, but also a matter of life. One part of that work is to draw into our awareness and into language itself the unobvious and the unexpected.

Art is eternal for it reveals the inner landscape which is the soul of man.

Often with good sentiments we produce bad literature.

When I write, I tend toward melancholy, and the few times that I've tried pure joy in music, it doesn't really work that well. The joy can be through catharsis. I think that's what I do well, and observation.

Anytime a person can play the blues, he has a soul and he has a 'lift' to play anything else he wants to play. It's sort of like the foundation to a building.

I feel often very close to the ecstasy and anguish which lie at the very heart of poetry - I am writing a lot.

I think good creative writing opens up space for people to come into. Let God reach out and touch the human soul. That's not my job. I get to be present and create as much space as I can ... That frees me up just to be creative in the way I want to be.

I think of poetry as something out there in the world and within each of us. I don't mean that everyone can write poetry - it's an art, a craft, it requires enormous commitment like any art. But there's a core of desire in each of us and poetry goes to and comes from that core. It's the social, economic, institutional gap that makes it difficult.

And painted portraits have a life of their own that comes from deep in the soul of the painter and where the machine can't go.

I want to write, but more than that, I want to bring out all kinds of things that lie buried deep in my heart.

People in general attach too much importance to words. They are under the illusion that talking effects great results. As a matter of fact, words are, as a rule, the shallowest portion of all the argument. They but dimly represent the great surging feelings and desires which lie behind. When the distraction of the tongue is removed, the heart listens.

The kind of poetry I write, lyric poetry, I think is really concerned with intimacy, with mystery. That needn't be religious mystery, there are mysteries to do with everyday life.

I need to write about love. I need to think and think and write about love-otherwise, my soul won’t survive.

Art seems to me to be above all a state of soul.

By its very looseness, by its way of evoking rather than defining, suggesting rather than saying, English is a magnificent vehicle for emotional poetry.