Tim Burton Quotes

Poetry is not a matter of feelings, it is a matter of language. It is language which creates feelings.

All poetry is an ordered voice, one which tries to tell you about a vision in the un-visionary language of farm, city, and love.

Not for a moment, beautiful aged Walt Whitman, have I failed to see your beard full of butterflies.

When I think of Emily Dickinson, there's not one particular poem of hers that jumps out, but I do have a very vivid image of an ill woman with giant eyes who wants to write about the sun exploding.

What has always attracted me in life is poetry. Any genre can have poetry. For me, poetry contains truth.

Lyrics need to be good, but they don't need to be obvious right away.

Elizabeth Bishop in particular had a big impact on me personally as well as artistically. Her insistence on clarity is something I rate very highly.

Statues and pictures and verse may be grand, But they are not the Life for which they stand.

Poetry is ordinary language raised to the Nth power. Poetry is boned with ideas, nerved and blooded with emotions, all held together by the delicate, tough skin of words.

Poetry is the opening and closing of a door, leaving those who look through to guess about what is seen during the moment.

Poetry is the art of creating imaginary gardens with real toads.

Keats writes better about poems than anybody I've ever read. The things that he says about what he wants his own poems to be are the ideals that I share.

I'm very attracted to poetry for all the reasons someone likes poetry. The notion of compression seems to fit my personality.

I like to use horror as allegory.

I think poetry is able to say things in such a small, perfect way that are so hard to say. I think it's a perfect medium for expressing difficult ideas and concepts and feelings. It's one of my great loves.

I've always been very thematic with my work, very conceptual.

I've always loved color because it's a little bit like music. I love that it seems to be both physical and ephemeral and engages us as a metaphor for our feeling lives.

I don't ever get too literal.

In terms of smaller changes over time, I think good plays are like poems. Every syllable counts. So I wrestle with word choice, rhythm in final drafts.

The poem is itself a mirror.

I'm only interested in poetry.

The metaphor is perhaps one of man's most fruitful potentialities. Its efficacy verges on magic, and it seems a tool for creation which God forgot inside one of His creatures when He made him. All our faculties keep us within the realm of the real, of what is already there. The most we can do is to combine things or break them up. The metaphor alone furnishes an escape; between the real things, it lets emerge imaginary reefs, a crop of floating islands.

Metaphor creates a new reality from which the original appears to be unreal.

A man lies upon the floor, spreads his arms, and transforms himself into a ship of a thousand sails.

Is not the real experience of each individual very limited? And, if a writer dwells upon that solely or principally, is he not in danger of repeating himself, and also of becoming an egotist? Then, too, imagination is a strong, restless faculty, which claims to be heard and exercised: are we to be quite deaf to her cry, and insensate to her struggles? When she shows us bright pictures, are we never to look at them, and try to reproduce them? And when she is eloquent, and speaks rapidly and urgently in our ear, are we not to write to her dictation?