Marc Chagall Quotes

I decided that it was not wisdom that enabled poets to write their poetry, but a kind of instinct or inspiration, such as you find in seers and prophets who deliver all their sublime messages without knowing in the least what they mean.

Jimi Hendrix, the Who, the Dead, Zeppelin, the Beatles - I paint to this music all of the time.

If you're going to be an artist, real life is your inspiration.

Any composer who is gloriously conscious that he is a composer must believe that he receives his inspiration from a source higher than himself.

Inspiration is an awakening, a quickening of all man's faculties, and it is manifested in all high artistic achievements.

I'd love to have William Faulkner, Beethoven and Bach over. I want to find out what makes those guys tick!

I've never been able to understand where great artists come from.

The model should only serve the very private function for the painter of providing the starting point for his excitement.

Great art inspires great art.

I don't really care who gets their inspiration from where, it's the end results that count.

Works of art inspire me to compose.

The feeling that you want the listener to get, you should get yourself when you first hit that chord, and that melody comes to mind.

(Songwriting) It's a gift. It all comes from somewhere. I started out really young, when I was four, five, six, writing poems, before I could play an instrument. I was writing about things when I was eight or 10 years old that I hadn't lived long enough to experience.

If an artist may say nothing except what he has invented by his own sole efforts, it stands to reason he will be poor in ideas. If he could take what he wants wherever he could find it, as Euripides and Dante and Michelangelo and Shakespeare and Bach were free, his larder would always be full, and his cookery might be worth tasting.

You know, it's a pretty mysterious thing still, why you start the songs you start, and the specific flavor of them, the nature of them. I don't know about other writers, but, for me, it's still somewhat out of my control. It's not really a logical process.

Only poetry inspires poetry.

I think your life informs your art.

I'll write, because I'll give - You critics means to live; For should I not supply - The cause, the effect would die

You know, artists are influenced by other artists. We're all deeply influenced by what's around us; we don't make anything cold. Sometimes we think that we do. But within that, the most important part is that even though we're influenced, what are the levels of invention that we carry forth even as we've been influenced by something that's come before?

If you're a good composer, you steal good steals.

[Personal life] doesn't affect my creative process. It just gives me more subjects to talk about. Basically whatever you put in your music is how you want people to view you.

Angel and Muse approach from without; the Angel sheds light and the Muse gives form (Hesiod learned of them). Gold leaf or chiton-folds: the poet finds his models in his laurel coppice. But the Duende, on the other hand, must come to life in the nethermost recesses of the blood.

I'm interested in art, and I think about the process of making art. It's part of my personality, my experience of the world, so it ends up in the movies. It's where my head is.

I wake up in the morning, or the middle of the night when an idea comes through. My songwriting style, basically I just write down information given to me from the muse and how that works for songwriters. Record the muse and the muse delivers.

Great imaginations are apt to work from hints and suggestions, and a single moment of emotion is sometimes sufficient to create a masterpiece.