John Adams Quotes

So it is in poetry. All we ask is that the mood recorded shall impress us as having been of the kind that exhausts the imaginative capacity; if it fails to do this the failure will announce itself either in prose or in insignificant verse.

I want a man in my life, not in my house.

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

Art is basically communication, and I think everyone who's a music lover has had that experience where a record or a recording has kept you company when no one else is around. And I think that is what I'm hoping that people get out of my music.

The songs are my lexicon. I believe the songs.

When I was a little boy, I was reading Dante and I was saying to myself 'Bravo, Dante, Bravo.' It's so beautiful, the music, the sound, the meaning. I felt like calling him by phone, like a friend.

Some people go to priests; others to poetry; I to my friends.

For me, the power of the poetry in 'Milk and Honey' is the feeling you get after finished reading the poem. It's the emotion you feel once you've read the last word, and that is only possible when the diction is easy, and you don't get stuck on every other word, you don't know what the word means.

I started with poetry because it was direct, immediate, and short. It was the ecstasy of striking matches in the dark.

I write poems for myself and I write poetry that gets torn apart and becomes songs. I have a lot of respect for words, the power of words.

What would we not give for some great poem to read now, which would be in harmony with the scenery,--for if men read aright, methinks they would never read anything but poems. No history nor philosophy can supply their place.

We poets would die of loneliness but for women, and we choose our men friends that we may have somebody to talk about women with. Letter to Olivia Shakespeare, 1936

That I make poetry and give pleasure - if I give pleasure - are because of you.

As a prose writer, I work with language; and those who work with language turn to poetry for renewal.

Poetry and art nourish the soul of the world with the flavor-filled substances of beauty, wisdom and truth.

Writing music is like tasting the sky. It keeps me dreaming in color.

The poet should touch our heart by showing his own

A poet, as he is the author to others of the highest wisdom, pleasure, virtue, and glory, so he ought personally to be the happiest, the best, the wisest, and the most illustrious of men.

I am all the time thinking about poetry and fiction and you.

Poetry is mostly hunches.

When we are most alone is when we embrace another's loneliness.

For me writing isn't a mental exercise, it's barely even a literary exercise, it feels like a spiritual experience.

You don't make a photograph just with a camera. You bring to the act of photography all the pictures you have seen, the books you have read, the music you have heard, the people you have loved.

Poetry had breathed over and sanctified the land.

She needed him to keep her sane, to make her laugh, to feel complete