Edwidge Danticat Quotes

Art, it seems to me, doesn't need freedom so much as it needs courage and love - some would call it 'soul' or 'Eros.'

I've constantly tried new things, even as a child, and have always been obsessed with pink. Now I'm just a little more ladylike and fearless. You should never feel afraid to become a piece of art. It's exhilarating.

My parents taught me to believe that through the creative act, we're able to transcend and give a response to desecration.

Art's a very metaphysical activity. It's something that enriches the parameters of your life, the possibilities of being, and you touch transcendence and you change your life. And you want to change the life of others, too. That's why people are involved with art.

Art requires neither complaisance nor politeness; nothing but faith, faith and freedom.

Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.

Honestly, without art and dance, I think I would be a very safe, black-and-white thinker. I wouldn't dare to take any risks or see so much of the world in myself and other people!

I feel like, Estonia, the sky is so low, and the people are much more close-minded than in America. So when I came to the U.S., I had a massive explosion of creativity and felt like I could do basically anything I want.

My life and career is defined by the constant pursuit of new forms of culture and self-expression.

I wake up with new dreams every day...more I can do to channel that into things that I love to create is healthier for me and probably for everybody around me.

It’s very hard to have ideas. It’s very hard to put yourself out there, it’s very hard to be vulnerable, but those people who do that are the dreamers, the thinkers and the creators. They are the magic people of the world.

You know a trillion times more about art than me. But I’ve learned that it isn’t necessary to know all that much. You just make what you wanna see, right? It’s a game, right? It’s like being paid for dreaming.

I collected pictures and I drew pictures and I looked at the pictures by myself. And because no one else ever saw them, the pictures were perfect and true. They were alive.

Sometimes I thought of the Peace Corps as a reverse refugee organization, displacing all of us lost Midwesterners, and it was probably the only government entity that taught Americans to abandon key national characteristics. Pride, ambition, impatience, the instinct to control, the desire to accumulate, the missionary impulse - all of it slipped away.

I made a creativity out of that messiness.

For Poesy alone can tell her dreams, With the fine spell of words alone can save Imagination from the sable charm And dumb enchantment. Who alive can say, ‘Thou art no Poet may’st not tell thy dreams?’ Since every man whose soul is not a clod Hath visions, and would speak, if he had loved And been well nurtured in his mother tongue. Whether the dream now purpos’d to rehearse Be poet’s or fanatic’s will be known When this warm scribe my hand is in the grave.

May your coming year be filled with magic and dreams and good madness. I hope you read some fine books and kiss someone who thinks you're wonderful, and don't forget to make some art -- write or draw or build or sing or live as only you can. And I hope, somewhere in the next year, you surprise yourself.

It is not only my dreams, my belief is that all these dreams are yours as well. The only distinction between me and you is that I can articulate them. And that is what poetry or painting or literature or filmmaking is all about... and it is my duty because this might be the inner chronicle of what we are. We have to articulate ourselves, otherwise we would be cows in the field.

One of the things that kept me out of trouble was doing something creative - creativity can't be judged.

Art that submits to orthodoxy, to even the soundest doctrines, but lacks imagination and deep self-expression is lost leaving only the craftsmanship.

I can't understand how anyone is able to paint without optimism.

I started to write songs. And I started to like what I was writing. I think it's a new way for me to express things that are closer to myself than when I play a role, because, of course, it's really not me. I'm finding a new way. I don't know what it's going to be. But I know that I will need to give it to people one day.

Creation is everything you do. Make something.

That's the artist's job, really: continually setting yourself free, and giving yourself new options and new ways of thinking about things.