Muhammad Iqbal Quotes

Reason is a fine thing, but it is not the only thing available to a writer. It's just part of the arsenal of many things available to a storyteller. Revelation, for example.

For a creative writer possession of the 'truth' is less important than emotional sincerity.

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

What has always attracted me in life is poetry. Any genre can have poetry. For me, poetry contains truth.

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

I believe poetry has very little to do with memory.

Poetry is not a matter of feelings, it is a matter of language. It is language which creates feelings.

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.

To be creative means to connect. It's to abolish the gap between the body, the mind and the soul, between science and art, between fiction and nonfiction.

Nonfiction speaks to the head. Fiction speaks to the heart. Poetry speaks to the soul. It's the essence of beauty. The essence of pain. It pleases the eye and the ear.

Poetry is ordinary language raised to the Nth power. Poetry is boned with ideas, nerved and blooded with emotions, all held together by the delicate, tough skin of words.

I like words. Words are places, rooms, distant airs, thin and tropical. They make us feel and imagine we are more than our bodies.

It is not enough to know your craft - you have to have feeling. Science is all very well, but for us imagination is worth far more.

Turin is a city which entices a writer towards vigor, linearity, style. It encourages logic, and through logic it opens the way towards madness.

When superstition is allowed to perform the task of old age in dulling the human temperament, we can say goodbye to all excellence in poetry, in painting, and in music.

The best of a book is not the thought which it contains, but the thought which it suggests; just as the charm of music dwells not in the tones but in the echoes of our hearts.

A creative element is surely present in all great systems, and it does not seem possible that all sympathy or fundamental attitudes of will can be entirely eliminated from any human philosophy.

I'm a big fan of lyrics - lyrics are the thing that move me in certain ways.

I think that's what poets try to do: They try to sidestep neurology and go straight to meaning.

The great philosophers are poets who believe in the reality of their poems.

A single metaphor can give birth to love.

You can't make poetry out of thought; poetry is passion. Linear thought must be seduced by wild mind, by the fires of ecstasy.

There are so many things that poetry is about, one of which is memory.

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