Ian Mcewan Quotes

When I have worries, fears or a love affair, I have the luck of being able to transform it into a poem.

In the hands of a great poet, words have ways of affecting us in ways we don't understand.

I'm the type of artist who touches people, that's the type of artist that I am.

Auden said poetry makes nothing happen. But I wonder if the opposite could be true. It could make something happen.

I think there is a poem out there for everyone, to be an entrance into the poetry and a relationship with it.

Art has the power to transform, to illuminate, to educate, inspire and motivate.

Pain is filtered in a poem so that it becomes finally, in the end, pleasure.

It never ceases to amaze me how art can touch and inspire people.

Creating music and just having someone's art directs the way you think about life subconsciously.

...we're all in a soup of trying to live by words, and trying to live by poetry. It's both humbling, and really flattering to know that my words are part of all that.

Art isn't only a painting. Art is anything that is creative, passionate and personal. Art is the unique work of a human being created to touch another. Art is created to have an impact, to change someone else.

Reading [poetry], you know, is rather like opening the door to a horde of rebels who swarm out attacking one in twenty places at once - hit, roused, scraped, bared, swung through the air, so that life seems to flash by; then again blinded, knocked on the head - all of which are agreeable sensations for a reader (since nothing is more dismal than to open the door and get no response).

Putting all of my time In learning to care And a bucket of rhymes I threw up somewhere Want a locket of who Made me lose my perfunctory view Of all that is around And of all that I do.

Patti, did art get us?' I looked away, not really wanting to think about it. 'I don't know, Robert. I don't know.' Perhaps it did, but no one could regret that. Only a fool would regret being had by art; or a saint.

When people say, 'I don't get art' ... that means art is working.

A good [short story] would take me out of myself and then stuff me back in, outsized, now, and uneasy with the fit.

The power of music, whether joyous or cathartic must steal on one unawares, come spontaneously as a blessing or a grace--

Quite often, lyrics get misunderstood - and I never mind that. I guess what all artists want is for their work to touch someone or for it to bethought provoking.

The power of art is as powerful as weapons of mass destruction; it's just where war destroys, art inspires. But in order to inspire, you need to react to it. And, if it doesn't penetrate your mind, you can't react to it.

And suddenly I knew I was people and could not stop laughing.

I've been really fortunate where I've made stuff that connects to people on a positive level, and that makes me feel really good, but I can't feel comfortable in dictating what they're supposed to feel out of it, nor am I a professional in something where I can really help people any farther than creating the things that I make to help myself.

The artists that I love- whether painters or filmmakers- it's because something resonates in me because I've felt it.

You know when somebody really knows what they're drawing from and you can feel it when you see the movie.

The greatest works of art speak to us without knowing us.

I have performed for thousands when they found me exotic, the vogue, daring, but I have danced, at any given time, for about ten people... They were the ones that left the theater forever different from the way they were when they came in. All of my long, long life, I have danced for those ten.