Maurice Sendak Quotes

The mystical poetry of William Blake's artwork also forms the basis for the album cover.

William Blake is my favorite poet of all time, and he said that he wasn't quite familiar with the sounds of music. If so, he would have been a musician.

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright In the forests of the night, What immortal hand or eye Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

Blake has always been a favorite, the lyrics, not so much the prophetic books, but I suppose Yeats influenced me more as a young poet, and the American, Robert Frost.

When I think of Emily Dickinson, there's not one particular poem of hers that jumps out, but I do have a very vivid image of an ill woman with giant eyes who wants to write about the sun exploding.

'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner' had a formative effect on me. I think it's one of those works that if you encounter it very early you're doubly enchanted by the beauty of the language and the strangeness of the vision. It stays with you.

Yeats was 18th-century oratory, almost.

Two more years were to go by before I knew anything about William Blake. Many years later, when his wife died, my godfather gave me the two books as a remembrance.

I have always believed that the material world is governed by nonmaterial sources, so that in that sense 'English Music' is an exercise in the spiritual as well as the material. I have always been attracted to the Gothic and spiritual imagination, and I've always been interested in visionaries.

Whitman was Emerson translated from the abstract into the concrete.

The people, the culture... there's so much magic in Colombia, so I feel like being a kid, being able to have that, being able to also call Colombia my home, it was such an important part of my introduction as an artist, too, because it's such a big part of my life as a human being.

I've gone to Yaddo many times, I've worked at the Rockefeller Foundation's Center for Scholars and Artists in Bellagio. That these are places of beauty and of changed landscape is helpful - but far more important for me is that they offer what I feel as a monastic luxury: undisturbed time.

With everyone born human, a poet - an artist - is born, who dies young and who is survived by an adult.

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

In living off all the reflecting light furnished by poets, the I which dreams the reverie reveals itself not as poet but as poetizing I.

The child and the great artist -- these alone receive the sensation fresh as it was at the beginning of the world.

With lyrics for me, it's usually musically-based. It's not really poetry- or writer-based. It's rock-based. It doesn't mean that I'm aping rock lyrics, but I'm writing from a music standpoint. I'm thinking more of music heroes, if they're in my mind. Not William Blake or John Ashbury. Sometimes maybe I thought of him a little bit. Or Wallace Stevens. I don't even really fully understand either of them.

Every true artist does feel, consciously or unconsciously, that he is touching transcendental truths; that his images are shadows of things seen through the veil. In other words, the natural mystic does know that there is something there, something behind the clouds or within the trees; but he believes that the pursuit of beauty is the way to find it; that imagination is a sort of incantation that can call it up.

Every artist is a cannibal/every poet is a thief/all kill for inspiration/and then sing about the grief.

Read Blake or go to hell, that's my message to the modern world.

The poet, like the lover, is a menace on the assembly line.

You know, artists are influenced by other artists. We're all deeply influenced by what's around us; we don't make anything cold. Sometimes we think that we do. But within that, the most important part is that even though we're influenced, what are the levels of invention that we carry forth even as we've been influenced by something that's come before?

I was intoxicated by the romantic poetry of our great writers. I arranged the world according to my private use, looking at it through the poems I had devoured.

To walk with nature as a poet is the necessary condition of a perfect artist.

As artists, it's really important to take time to see what other art is happening and to know what's happening in the world.