James Agee Quotes

When poets go off the boil, they sound like bumble bees; when critics do, they sound like sewing machines.

The poet, as everyone knows, must strike his individual note sometime between the ages of fifteen and twenty-five. He may hold it a long time, or a short time, but it is then that he must strike it or never. School and college have been conducted with the almost express purpose of keeping him busy with something else till the danger of his ever creating anything is past.

Each period of a civilisation creates an art that is specific in it and which we will never see reborn. To try and revive the principles of art of past centuries can lead only to the production of stillborn works.

We may outgrow the things of children, without acquiring sense and relish for those which become a man.

Poverty is just a state of mind.

I lay puzzle as I backtrack to earlier times, Nothing's equivalent to the New York state of mind

For a poet is an airy thing, winged and holy, and he is not able to make poetry until he becomes inspired and goes out of his mind and his intellect is no longer in him.

Recipe for the upbringing of a poet: 'As much neurosis as the child can bear.

Chastity is more a state of mind than of anatomy.

I think most musicians know if they make the same record twice, even if they say they don't.

Nine-tenths of English poetic literature is the result either of vulgar careerism or of a poet trying to keep his hand in. Most poets are dead by their late twenties.

I was married to a state of mind and I divorced it

I keep saying this about a mental state, but the more that I am physically active, the more that my mind is clear.

Whenever serious art loses track of its roots in the vernacular, then it begins to atrophy.

A painting is not thought out in advance. While it is being done, it changes as one’s thoughts change. And when it’s finished, it goes on changing, according to the state of mind of whoever is looking at it

If anyone comes to the gates of poetry and expects to become an adequate poet by acquiring expert knowledge of the subject without the Muses' madness, he will fail, and his self-controlled verses will be eclipsed by the poetry of men who have been driven out of their minds.

Your state of mind is everything.

Insanity is just a state of mind.

It is not so much the being exempt from faults as the having overcome them that is an advantage to us; it being with the follies of the mind as with weeds of a field, which if destroyed and consumed upon the place where they grow, enrich and improve it more than if none had ever sprung there.

Writing poetry is a state of free float.

A state of mind is something that one assumes. It cannot be purchased, it must be created.

Happiness is an elusive state of mind not to be gained by clumsy pursuit.It is given to those who do not sue for it:to be unconcerned about a desired good is probably the only way to possess it.

The nobler and more perfect a thing is, the later and slower it is in arriving at maturity. A man reaches the maturity of his reasoning powers and mental faculties hardly before the age of twenty-eight; a woman at eighteen.

I have often argued that a poet more than thirty years old is simply an overgrown child. I begin to suspect that there may be some truth in it.

Insecurity is not just a state of mind.