Jules Renard Quotes

Now begins to rise in me the familiar rhythm; words that have lain dormant now lift, now toss their crests, and fall and rise, and falls again. I am a poet, yes. Surely I am a great poet.

The poet is he who inspires, rather than he who is inspired.

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.

After I'd produced about two dozen pen and ink drawings, one evening I decided that they needed poems to accompany them. I still have no idea where that notion came from, but it took me about two hours to produce verses for these creatures.

The poet doesn't invent. He listens.

I found the poems in the fields And only wrote them down

For a man to become a poet (witness Petrarch and Dante), he must be in love, or miserable.

Poems come from incomplete knowledge.

All the things an artist must be: poet, explorer of nature, philosopher!

One Power alone makes a Poet: Imagination. The Divine Vision.

After writing all day I go for a walk and see a piece of architecture i want to photograph and i have to take a picture and later a poem comes in my mind.

The true Poet is all-knowing; he is an actual world in miniature.

The poets down here don't write nothin' at all, they just stand back and let it all be.

The poet in prose or verse - the creator - can only stamp his images forcibly on the page in proportion as he has forcibly felt, ardently nursed, and long brooded over them.

The stuff of which masterpieces are made drifts about the world waiting to be clothed in words.

A poem is made up of thoughts, each of which filled the whole sky of the poet in its turn.

If a poet is anybody, he is somebody to whom things made matter very little - somebody who is obsessed by Making.

A good artist has less time than ideas.

My greatest joy comes from creativity: from feeling that I have been able to identify a certain aspect of human nature and crystallise a phenomenon in words.

The eye is the notebook of the poet.

When I first made a grid, I happened to be thinking of the innocence of trees, and then a grid came into my mind and I thought it represented innocence, and I still do, and so I painted it and then I was satisfied. I thought, 'This is my vision.'

The few bad poems which occasionally are created during abstinence are of no great interest.

I am an artist, you understand? For me, a picture is like poetry. When you make art, this is not coming from an intellectual place. It's coming from the deep side of your unconscious, your soul.