Poetic power is great, strong as a primitive instinct; it has its own unyielding rhythms in itself and breaks out as out of mountains.
I know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty of an artistic process.
Art objects are inanimate sad bits of matter hanging in the dark when no one is looking. The artist only does half the work; the viewer has to come up with the rest, and it is by empowering the viewer that the miracle of art gains its force.
jazz is the expression of America's romantic self, its sensual potency, its lyrical force.
The artistic temperament is a disease that affects amateurs. Artists of a large and wholesome vitality get rid of their art easily, as they breathe easily or perspire easily. But in artists of less force, the thing becomes a pressure, and produces a definite pain, which is called the artistic temperament.
Poetry is the liquid voice that can wear through stone.
Life is entirely unthinkable without any of the creative arts, and they're all a continuum - the force in question is creativity, not its mode of expression.
I didn't write my poems because I wanted to, they were wrung from me. I had to write them.
Every once in a while I feel the tremendous force of the novel. But it does not stay with me.
A song is an emotional lightning bolt - a good one, anyway.
Art is vice. One does not wed it, one rapes it.
... the novel, as a living force, if not as a work of art, owes an incalculable debt to what we call, mistakenly, the new psychology, to Freud, in his earlier interpretations, and more truly, I think, to Jung.
I believe that music is a force in itself. It is there and it needs an outlet, a medium. In a way, we are just the medium.
The muse, the beloved, and duende are three ways of thinking of what is the source of poetry, and all three seem to me different names or different ways to think about something that is not entirely reasonable, not entirely subject to the will, not entirely rational.
I think that art is an act of violence, and the more emotionally engaged you are in a piece of art, the more violent it feels.
Emotional truth is the reward of digging deeply enough to find the truth about how one really feels, but in order to convey this truth with any force, or artistry, one needs to 'create' a form of expression, and this form determines its own "genuine information".
Music happens. It cannot be made.
Such sweet compulsion doth in music lie.
