artistic muse Quotes

In L.A., you have to drive; in New York, you can do it on foot. The variety, the potential, of people is in your face. Like any good creator, you want to steal everything.

I don't sit down to write a song; they just come to me from something that somebody says, or something in the news. The punchline comes to me, and I go over it in my head and get the song form. I hadn't been doing that a lot.

Rhyme and meter force gaps in meaning so the muse can enter.

In the beginning, there was a kind of energy that - like an urgency to express myself, and the songs just couldn't be held in. But I think it changes, the nature of how that - what that energy is. And I need to court the muse in a much more serious way.

This is a gift that I have, simple, simple; a foolish extravagant spirit full of forms, figures, shapes, objects, ideas, apprehensions, motions, revolutions; these are begot in the ventricle of memory, nourished in the womb of pia mater, and delivered upon the mellowing of occasion.

The poet, by composing poems, uses a language that is neither dead nor living, that few people speak, and few people understand We are the servants of an unknown force that lives within us, manipulates us, and dictates this language to us.

I don't write songs, songs write me.

I honor health as the first Muse.

The art of writing is mysterious; the opinions we hold are ephemeral , and I prefer the Platonic idea of the Muse to that of Poe, who reasoned, or feigned to reason, that the writing of a poem is an act of the intelligence. It never fails to amaze me that the classics hold a romantic theory of poetry, and a romantic poet a classical theory.

Wait a second while I take a swig off this bottle: it's my true and only Helicon, my Caballine fount, my sole Enthusiasm. Here, drinking, I deliberate, I reason, I resolve and conclude. After the epilogue I laugh, I write, I compose, I drink. Ennius drinking would write, writing would drink.

Alas! I do not believe that inspiration falls from heaven. think it rather the result of a profound indolence.

The function of poetry is religious invocation of the muse; its use is the experience of mixed exaltation and horror that her presence excites.

The Muse visits during the process of creation, not before.

'Two Voices,' from my album with Peter Schwalm, is an intact dream-poem. I awoke one night with an image of a piece of paper and all the words of the poem written on it, so I just blundered down to the kitchen table and 'copied it out.'

I think of mythology as the homeland of the muses, the inspirers of art, the inspirers of poetry. To see life as a poem and yourself participating in a poem is what the myth does for you.

I had toward the poetic art a peculiar relation which was only practical after I had cherished in my mind for a long time a subject which possessed me, a model which inspired me, a predecessor who attracted me, until at length, after I had molded it

Writing songs always trumps whatever else was on the schedule, it really is the most important and can be so fickle, you have to grab it when it's there.

Creativity is always from the beyond.

What is The Subconscious to every other man, in its creative aspect becomes, for writers, The Muse.

Women are our most miraculous muse, an enchanted intangibility that encourages all art.

During the course of the year a number of ideas just come up automatically. I could be walking down the street. Or shaving. An idea will hit me and I'll write it down. Then, when I'm ready to write, I check my little matchbooks and napkins and find that it is good or it's pretty terrible. There are other times when I don't have any ideas and I'll go into a room and close the door and I sit and sweat it out for a day or a month and eventually I come up with [something].

I think inspiration is always around; it's just a question of whether or not you're noticing it.

Little Wing is like one of these beautiful girls that come around sometimes ... you play your gig; it's the same thing as the olden days, and these beautiful girls come around.. you do actually fall in love with them because that's the only love you can have. It's not always the physical thing of "Oh, there's one over there ...", it's not one of those scenes. They actually tell you something. They release different things inside themselves ... "Little Wing" was a very sweet girl that came around that gave me her whole life and more if I wanted it.

You can't plan for a seizure of feeling, and for this reason I put everything else aside when I'm inspired.

Art goes on in your head. If you said something interesting, that might be a title for a work of art and I'd write it down.