Guy Davenport Quotes

My opinion is that a poet should express the emotion of all the ages and the thought of his own.

We have such a great depth of human history in all of the arts, whether it's opera or mathematics or painting or classical music or jazz. There's so many things to study, new books to read, and certainly always ways to transform old ideas and to come up with new ones.

I try to give people a different way of looking at their surroundings. That's art to me.

The creative act amazes me. Whether it's poetry, whether it's music, it's an amazing process, and it has something to do with bringing forth the old out into the world to create and to bring forth that which will rejuvenate.

Men admire the man who can organize their wishes and thoughts in stone and wood and steel and brass.

Our utilitarian structures will mature into architecture only when, through their fulfillment of function, they become carriers of the will of the age.

Always, however brutal an age may actually have been, its style transmits its music only.

True music must repeat the thought and inspirations of the people and the time.

I have realised how exciting and easy it is to be a time traveller by looking at paintings and films and architecture and playing music or listening to it. I don't think you necessarily have to live in the present all the time.

It doesn't matter the kind of music, it doesn't matter whether it's a cowboy hat or a yarmulke. I don't care if it's outer space or pop, the spirit is the same.

Society wants to categorize everything, but to me it's all African-American music.

I always would dream of making music videos. Whenever I make music, I always have a visual in my mind. I always see things.

Entertainment isn't just based on the very structured syndrome of European popular music, and it's great that there are so many thousands of people who are of the same opinion.

I take a lot from everywhere. I take from music, architecture, novels, and plays. Anywhere that hits you.

I've always been attracted to classic patterns in architecture, music and drama.

Is it true that we must accept the music of another race as being that which is American? Have not the white Americans sufficient individuality to develop a characteristic style of composition.

You will find in the streets of New York every variety of architecture, just as you find in its libraries all the literatures of the world, and in its theatres all the music, and in its houses all the decorative arts.

Historically, in the world of architecture, enormous amounts of care and energy have been lavished on things that are almost a cliched idea of culture.

When they're singing the guitar lines of songs in South America? Never heard that before. And in Canada, when they're singing all of the lyrics to every song - that blows me away. I don't know all the lyrics to every song.

If your vision of the world is of a certain kind you will put poetry in everything, necessarily.

Without the definiteness of sculpture and painting, music is, for that very reason, far more suggestive. Like Milton's Eve, an outline, an impulse, is furnished, and the imagination does the rest.

A musician, an artist, an architect: the man or woman who is not one of these is not a Christian.

Who wants to put together something that will bear some relationship to the vision or memory or experience or story or idea or dream or whatever.

There are only four great arts: music, painting, sculpture, and ornamental pastry- architecture being perhaps the least banal derivative of the latter.

Art teaches us to see into things. Folk art and kitsch allow us to see outward from within things.