Artistic Language Quotes

My popularity has to do with the divorce between modern art, where everything is obscure, and the viewer who often feels he needs a professor to tell them whether it's good or not. I believe a painting has to talk directly to the viewer, with composition, color and design, without a professor to explain it.

When words leave off, music begins.

I know that poetry is indispensable, but to what I could not say.

Art is the most effective mode of communications that exists.

Painting is silent poetry.

I find I cannot exist without Poetry

English is my first language, but musically speaking, I write my music in Spanish.

My definition of poetry (if I were forced to give one) would be this: words that have become deeds.

Poetry, which is written while no one is looking, is meant to be looked at for all time.

Jazz music is a language of the emotions.

Art is a foreign city, and we deceive ourselves when we think it familiar. We have to recognize that the language of art, all art, is not our mother tongue.

Like an opera singer, I am able to sing out my song in paint.

Good prose is written only face to face with poetry.

Poetry is what happens when nothing else can.

Poetry is a lyrical insinuation. Often, its melodic subtlety kisses the subconscious mind.

Poetry is halfway between prose and music: it is sometimes like an intimate conversation, in words and phrases which need not be fully uttered, and sometimes like dancing and wordless music.

Poetry, far more than fiction, reveals the soul of humanity.

Poetry is a kind of ingenious nonsense (Spence, Anecdotes

poetry is where the language is renewed.

What is poetry? Do not enquire. The secret dies by prying. How does the heart beat? I fainted when I saw it on the screen, opening and closing like a flower ... Poetry is like this, it is life moving, terrible, vivid. Look the other way when you write, or you might faint.

Music is the literature of the heart; it commences where speech ends.

Look around—there's only one thing of danger for you here—poetry.

Art breaks open a dimension inaccessible to other experience, a dimension in which human beings, nature, and things no longer stand under the law of the established reality principle...The encounter with the truth of art happens in the estranging language and images which make perceptible, visible, and audible that which is no longer, or not yet, perceived, said, and heard in everyday life.

…only a poet could frame a language that could frame a world.

Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought.