Salvatore Quasimodo 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.

Language is a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, while all the time we long to move the stars to pity.

And any stone being mentally handled must become endowed with such poetry and artistry as God has given you.

There is no lighter burden, nor more agreeable, than a pen.

Money is everywhere but so is poetry. What we lack are the poets.

The moment you cheat for the sake of beauty, you know you're an artist.

Words, yes, formulating things, creating something from your heart, it is something very necessary, yes.

The higher the artist, the fewer the gestures. The fewer the tools, the greater the imagination. The greater the will, the greater the secret failure.

I like rhyme because it is memorable, I like form because having to work to a pattern gives me original ideas.

I want to create. I think that's the one word I can grow on.

Back in those early days when I began my apprenticeship as a poet, I also tried to voice our anger, spirit of defiance and resistance in a Jamaican poetic idiom.

A poet never takes notes. You never take notes in a love affair.

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.

When truth has no burning, then it is philosophy, when it gets burning from the heart, it becomes poetry.

Personality is everything in art and poetry.

Where the spirit does not work with the hand, there is no art.

Somebody informed me recently that the key to every art, from writing to gardening to sculpture, is creativity. I beg to differ.

Nature is commonplace. Imitation is more interesting.

I did not want to be a tree, a flower or a wave. In a dancer's body, we as audience must see ourselves, not the imitated behavior of everyday actions, not the phenomenon of nature, not exotic creatures from another planet, but something of the miracle that is a human being.

I'm ready to create.

Neither a lofty degree of intelligence nor imagination nor both together go to the making of genius. Love, love, love, that is the soul of genius.

The more life you have, the more it's in your pores, the more able you are to be creative as an artist.

It's what people create that makes my heart stop.

I believe in creative work.

If poets were realistic, they wouldn't be poets.