Edna St. Vincent Millay Quotes

The man who has no imagination has no wings.

When I turned to writing fantasy, and writing for young people, it was joyous. It was like discovering an underground lake of ideas that went on forever.

On stage, you're not limited at all because you're free in language: language is the source of the imagination. You can travel farther in language than you can in any film.

Stone walls confine a tinker; cold iron binds a witch; but a musician's music can never be fettered, for it lives first in her heart and mind.

Take a commonplace, clean it and polish it, light it so that it produces the same effect of youth and freshness and originality and spontaneity as it did originally, and you have done a poet's job. The rest is literature.

What lives in art and is eternally living, is first of all the painter and then the painting.

Joy is a part of my process. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that poetry, as a practice, necessitates a sense of joy. It's exhilarating to come into contact with the things we write into being. And a real sense of play and abandon – even when we are relying on hard-won technique, and even when the aim is deadly serious. How often do we get the excuse to stop, think, and then stop thinking altogether and try to listen to what sits behind our outside of our thoughts? Poets are lucky.

Poetry is the journal of a sea animal living on land, wanting to fly in the air.

The best thing as an actor, the best tool you have is your imagination. That you kind of take things that have happened, and then go and expand on them. However small it is, you use your imagination to create what that reality is. There's something kind of fun when you're not old enough to do anything, driving a car, getting into a bar, drinking, going to a party you don't belong to, something when you're young in that innocent way.

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.

From your parents you learn love and laughter and how to put one foot before the other. But when books are opened you discover that you have wings.

Commitment and creativity cannot be captured and handcuffed. Inspiration cannot be jailed. The heart cannot be contained.

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.

Sometimes it works. Sometimes I feel like playing 'Hospital'. Sometimes I feel like playing 'Pablo Picasso'. I've been playing a lot lately. I do it as long as I feel like it.

In the total darkness, poetry is still there, and it is there for you.

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.

Creativity is the greatest expression of liberty.

Rules and models destroy genius and art.

I loved everything that went with rock n' roll. I loved being at the heart of such creativity and being young in such a stimulating and exciting era.

My parents taught me to believe that through the creative act, we're able to transcend and give a response to desecration.

Everything is complicated; if that were not so, life and poetry and everything else would be a bore.

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.