Charles Lamb Quotes

You wind up creating from silence, like painting a picture on a blank canvas that could bring tears to somebody's eyes. As songwriters, our blank canvas is silence. Then we write a song from an idea that can change somebody's life. Songwriting is the closest thing to magic that we could ever experience. That's why I love songwriting.

The Greeks, those originators of the intellectual life, fixed for us the idea of the poet. He was a divine man; more sacred than the priest, who was at best an intermediary between men and the gods, but in the poet the god was present and spoke.

The muses visit when I'm lonely.

Making music and writing kind of come from the same creative place.

A lot of my songs are inspired by a muse of some sort, whether she's real or not.

Art itself, in all its methods, is the child of religion. The highest and best works in architecture, sculpture and painting, poetry and music, have been born out of the religion of Nature.

The Muse gave the Greeks genius and the art of the well-turned phrase.

The muses are ghosts, and sometimes they come uninvited.

If anyone comes to the gates of poetry and expects to become an adequate poet by acquiring expert knowledge of the subject without the Muses' madness, he will fail, and his self-controlled verses will be eclipsed by the poetry of men who have been driven out of their minds.

Sing in me, Muse, and through me tell the story

There is also a third kind of madness, which is possession by the Muses, enters into a delicate and virgin soul, and there inspiring frenzy, awakens lyric... But he, who, not being inspired and having no touch of madness in his soul, comes to the door and thinks he will get into the temple by the help of art - he, I say, and his poetry are not admitted; the sane man is nowhere at all when he enters into rivalry with the madman.

You are the song of every bird, you are the poet's every word, every artist's picture, every writer's play.

To be creative means to be in love with life. You can be creative only if you love life enough that you want to enhance its beauty, you want to bring a little more music to it, a little more poetry to it, a little more dance to it.

Song ideas have come to me in the middle of interviews, in the shower, or while I'm writing another song.

Sentiment is the poetry of the imagination.

We are all of us Apollos serving some Admetus.

I see in the melody of Nature, God. It is a wonderful work of art. The spirit of the art is wonderful. And I feel that I am myself because I have never taken music lightly. Music is the manifestation of God, like everything else.

I require silence to write the way an apple tree requires winter to make fruit. Being with people is intimate and joyous, but at some point, I'll wander off by myself. The paradox is that what began in childhood as an act of necessary solitude has led me straight to a life with others, in which I fly to China or Lithuania or northern Minnesota to read my poems and talk with other people who love language made into a lathe on which a life can be tuned and be turned.

If God made poets for anything, it was to keep alive the traditions of the pure, the holy, and the beautiful.

I wanted to write the most beautiful poem but that is impossible; the world has written its own.

The opening line from a journal can be the beginning of a song.

Poet's food is love and fame.

So much of creativity is the feeling that you're either getting a gift from some other dimension or some other part of yourself.

I went out under the sky, Muse! and I was your vassal.

How can I find the words? Poets have taken them all and left me with nothing to say or do" "Except to teach me for the first time what they meant.