Edith Sitwell Quotes

The great poems are not about experience, but are the experience itself, felt in the body.

An author accepting language's invitation to dance steps onto the floor of his her sensibility-charged consciousness and begins to move instinctively--even if with much dread--in ways that synchronize images, ideas, emotions, sounds, smells, ignorance, and knowledge.

In contact with materials, I can see so much more with my hands than I can just with my eyes. I'm a participant, not a spectator. I see myself both as an object and a material, and the human presence is really important to the landscapes in which I work.

Poetry expands the senses and keeps them in prime condition. It keeps you aware of your nose, your eye, your ear, your tongue, your hand.

Painting that does not radiate feeling is not worth looking at. The deepest-and rarest-of grown-up pleasures is true feeling.

I would define, in brief, the Poetry of words as the Rhythmical Creation of Beauty. Its sole arbiter is taste. With the intellect or with the conscience, it has only collateral relations. Unless incidentally, it has no concern whatever either with duty or with truth.

Architects and painters know precisely what they are about as long as they deal with material phenomena.... But when they come to the aesthetics of their work, when they aim at a particular effect on the mind or on the senses, the rules dissolve into nothing but vague ideas.

Don't you just love poetry that gives you a crinkly feeling up and down your back?

I don't really analyze my stuff when I write. I write about stuff that I'm interested in, that I'm feeling at that particular time. When I stand back and look at the complete work, I might see themes that run through the whole film, but I'm not really conscious of it when I'm doing it.

It is through observation and perception of atmosphere that he [the artist] can register the feeling that he wishes his painting to give out.

One discards rhyme, not because one is incapable of rhyming neat, fleet, sweet, meet, treat, eat, feet but because there are certain emotions or energies which are nor represented by the over-familiar devices or patterns.

The 'idea' for the poem, which may come as an image thrown against memory, as a sound of words that sets off a traveling of sound and meaning, as a curve of emotion (a form) plotted by certain crises of events or image or sound, or as a title which evokes a sense of inner relations; this is the first 'surfacing' of the poem. Then a period of stillness may follow.

Painting does not come from intelligence so much, as from sight and feeling and invention.

Poems don't have to rhyme... Poems are about beauty and emotion; in other words poems are about feelings.

I like the idea of imagining a sound and feeling a sound and then having it come out through your body, through an instrument. That's an important way to make music.

(Songwriting) It's a gift. It all comes from somewhere. I started out really young, when I was four, five, six, writing poems, before I could play an instrument. I was writing about things when I was eight or 10 years old that I hadn't lived long enough to experience.

Music gets us in touch with our emotions in a way that's more intimate than any other art form.

The only way an artist can communicate with the world at large is on the level of feeling.

But music, don't you know, is a dream from which the veils have been lifted. It's not even the expression of a feeling, it's the feeling itself.

In every painting, as in any other work of art, there is always an IDEA, never a STORY. The idea is the point of departure, the first cause of the plastic construction, and it is always present all the time as energy creating matter. The stories and other literary associations exist only in the mind of the spectator, the painting acting as the stimulus.

Thought that can merge wholly into feeling, feeling that can merge wholly into thought - these are the artist's highest joy.

Colors produce a spiritual vibration, the impression they create is important only as a step towards this vibration.

Those of us who make films try to make something that we're feeling and that we would like. Then we just hope an audience responds the same way. It's very important to have the electrical circuit made, but I don't have control over how people feel when they flip the switch. So the whole idea of marketing research and test screenings is just foreign to me.

A book should be a garden that fits in the hands. Word-petals of color. Stems of strength. roots of truth. Turn a page and turn the seasons. Read the sentence and enjoy the roses.

How can the poem and the stink and the grating noise - the quality of light, the tone, the habit and the dream - be set down alive?