Elia Kazan Quotes

Theater is far superior to film in poetry, in abstract poetry.

The writer of prose can only step aside when the poet passes.

Prose on certain occasions can bear a great deal of poetry; on the other hand, poetry sinks and swoons under a moderate weight of prose.

I think poets are much more dramatic, more theatrical than fiction writers.

My old teacher's definition of poetry is an attempt to understand.

Dramatic experience is not logical; it may be subdued to the kind of coherence that we indicate when we speak, in criticism, of form.

Poetry is the deification of reality.

Every type of purely direct concrete description bears the mark of artistic portrayal.

Acting and performing music is exactly the same. Therefore, an actor, for instance, who is very impressive, he's not simply imitating or trying to imitate, but he must dominate this kind of feeling, and then he transmits it in a much stronger way.

My work should be seen as poetry.

As actors, we are expected to come up with an exaggerated performance, which is far from reality.

I think that's what poets try to do: They try to sidestep neurology and go straight to meaning.

Whereas if you were writing an op-ed piece or an essay, somebody would be asking, "What's your point?" With poetry you can stay in a moment for as long as you want. Poetry is about metaphor, about a thing standing in for something else. It's the thing that opens out to something else. What that something else is changes for readers. So what's on the page - it falls away.

I am pure performance, and Robert Wilson is pure theater.

Poetry is a shuffling of boxes of illusions buckled with a strap of facts.

Poetry is the most informative of all of the arts because everything comes down to poetry. No matter what it is we are describing, ultimately we use either a metaphor; or we say "that's poetry in motion." You drink a glass of wine and say, "that's poetry in a bottle." Everything is poetry, so I think we come down to emotional information. And that's what poetry conveys.

I like bringing my poet brain and sensibility to lyrics I write.

My approach to portraiture is conceptual.

All the great artists illustrate their approach to life in the work they make.

Acting is illusion, as much illusion as magic is - and not so much a matter of being real.

The delight we find in art amounts to recognition of a saving grace, to an acknowledgment that the problem of life has a solution implicit in its own nature, though not yet formulated by the intellect.

Poetry is a kind of distilled insinuation. It's a way of expanding and talking around an idea or a question. Sometimes, more actually gets said through such a technique than a full frontal assault.

It's funny how that comes up, because sometimes I'll write something and I'll think, I don't know if that's a film or a play, and then other things I feel very strongly about them just being plays - they feel very theatrical to me.

It isn't enough to have had an interesting or hilarious or tragic life. Art isn't anecdote. It's the consciousness we bring to bear on our lives. For what happened in the story to transcend the limits of the personal, it must be driven by the engine of what the story means.

Think about what artists, novelists and poets have in common: the ability to engage in metaphorical thinking, linking seemingly unrelated ideas, such as, 'It is the east, and Juliet is the Sun.'