Ama Ata Aidoo Quotes

What inspires a poem for me is usually a moment.

I'm inspired by whatever I see, feel, hear about, watch on the TV...anything. It can be something that I really need to get off my chest so I write or something a friend is going through which gets my thoughts going.

The only thing that's really riled me up in the last ten years has been the White Stripes. That's the one band that's gotten me competitive, and that's good.

You can draw inspiration from anything. If you're a good storyteller, you can take a dirty look somebody gives you, or if a guy you used to have flirtations with starts dating a new girl, or somebody you're casually talking to says something that makes you so mad - you can create an entire scenario around that.

I never know what's going to move me. I'm always surprised. And it's always a mystery to the people who work with me.

I do not go in search of poetry. I wait for poetry to visit me.

A lot of things trigger my inspiration. It can be the most banal things.

Art is inspiring. Walking into a gallery, or when the lights go up on a stage; that thrill of getting something that has nothing to do with acquisition.

That impulse I think is a form of love. Poetry is something that comes to you, rather than your having to work out its form beforehand.

I believe in dreams. People should have faith in the songs poets sing.

Art is for stimulation, excitement, adventure.

A necessary process for the artist is one which begins with a point of view, a reaction to the environment, to people, to whatever it is one is concerned with.

A poet feels the impulse to create a work of art when the passive awe provoked by an event is transformed into a desire to express that awe in a rite of worship.

Between the conception and the creation, between the emotion and the response, Falls the shadow.

A poem may be worked over once it is in being, but may not be worried into being.

I sort of recognize it, as opposed to shaping it. Oh, that's a good idea, that's a good line. I wonder where I can use that. And when you get into a rhyme group like 'not,' you got a lot of rhymes, you got a lot of choices. The more you do it, the luckier you get.

There are certain scripts that are just written in a way where, for whatever reason, I read it, and instantly that inspiration hit me and it was just kind of electric, and I didn't have to think about it. It just kind of went from there.

Take a step, breathe in the world, give it out again in story, poem, song, art.

The science of Humboldt is one thing, poetry is another thing. The poet to-day, notwithstanding all the discoveries of science, and the accumulated learning of mankind, enjoys no advantage over Homer.

All great art comes from a sense of outrage.

The essential thing is to spring forth, to express the bolt of lightning one senses upon contact with a thing. The function of the artist is not to translate an observation but to express the shock of the object on his nature; the shock, with the original reaction.

Necessity may be the mother of lucrative invention, but it is the death of poetical invention.

Anyone who says, “Here’s my address, write me a poem,” deserves something in reply. So I’ll tell you a secret instead: poems hide. In the bottoms of our shoes, they are sleeping. They are the shadows drifting across our ceilings the moment before we wake up. What we have to do is live in a way that lets us find them.

He is exactly the poem I wanted to write.

Poetry, she thought, wasn't written to be analyzed; it was meant to inspire without reason, to touch without understanding.