Dana Gioia Quotes

I love to create, and to me, the ultimate freedom of expression is a blank canvas or a block of clay to capture whatever emotions your imagination gives it.

My heart and soul is still music.

I hope to continue writing. I hope to continue teaching.

It is the supreme art of the teacher to awaken joy in creative expression and knowledge.

I'd rather learn from one bird how to sing than teach 10,000 stars how not to dance.

If I weren't an actor, I'd either be a teacher or a critic.

I believe that the reason why I love painting so much is that it forces one to be objective. There is nothing I hate more than sentimentality.

Yes, I do often write poems from the mind, but I hope I don't ignore feelings and emotions.

Silence is a universal language. It's like music or painting.

I think great art comes from being open and creative with somebody, and of course, if feelings start getting involved in that, it can either make things fantastic or really messy.

Poetry, at its best, is the language your soul would speak if you could teach your soul to speak.

I figured I would be teaching my whole life and making experimental films on the side.

Creativity was definitely a big part of our household, and I remember always writing stories and being encouraged to be creative.

You can make poems out of anger as well as tenderness. You can make poetry out of anything. It can be the ugliest of emotions. It doesn't have to be sweetness and light.

My mother taught children to love to dance.

All this angst, all this stuff we all feel, is just tied to making art. It's so ancient.

Marvin Gaye said there's a song inside of me and I can't get it out. And I know it's in there, and I can feel that it's in there, and I can't get it out. There's so much that I want to say, and I haven't been able to figure out how to say it in my art. I can only say it in ham-fisted, clumsy, nonpoetic ways, and I'm trying to figure out how to talk about life and talk about love and talk about pain and trials and tribulation in an artistic form.

That's what art is. You don't make up stories. You live your life.

Music was born of love. Had there never been any human affection, there never could have been uttered a strain of music.

Literature is the voice of the human heart.

People can be chaos but it's hard to fit it into some creative piece that you made. It's hard.

Art is love and it covers. It sheilds.

Naked I came into the world, but brush strokes cover me, language raises me, music rhythms me. Art is my rod and staff, my resting place and shield, and not mine only, for art leaves nobody out. Even those from whom art has been stolen away by tyranny, by poverty, begin to make it again. If the arts did not exist, at every moment, someone would begin to create them, in song, out of dust and mud, and although the artifacts might be destroyed, the energy that creates them is not destroyed.

There's a great adage that says we sing because what we have to express can't be spoken, just using words.

A song should have all the color and beauty of every rose.