The Muse is mute when public men Applaud a modern throne.
Nature is garrulous to the point of confusion, let the artist be truly taciturn.
If a composer could state in words what being a composer means, he would no longer need to be a composer.
It is a mistake for a sculptor or a painter to speak or write very often about his job. It releases tension needed for his work.
It took me 14 years to write poems about Vietnam. I had never thought about writing about it, and in a way I had been systematically writing around it.
All artists dream of a silence which they must enter, as some creatures return to the sea to spawn.
That's always the time to quit - when you have nothing to say as an artist and creative person.
Men talk about art, and artists make art, but should artists talk?
The summit charms us, the steps to it do not; with the heights before our eyes, we like to linger in the plain. It is only a part of art that can be taught; but the artist needs the whole. He who is only half instructed speaks much and is always wrong; who knows it wholly is content with acting and speaks seldom or late.
In the greatest art, one is always aware of things that cannot be said. . .of the contradiction between expression and the presence of the inexpressible. Stylistic devices are also techniques of avoidance. The most potent elements of a work of art are, often, its silences.
Musicians used to be way more instrumental just in providing a soundtrack to what's going on in the world. And it's also important to state what we think. There's like this fear for their career, if they have anything intelligent to say about politics. And that's really messed up.
I can't imagine writing a novel without some sound. When you're facing a few hundred blank pages, silence can be cold.
I stopped writing at the age of 18. I had written incessantly before that. I read, of course, because I was in university, but I wasn't going to write. I wasn't going to do any of those dangerous things. I was going to be a stolid, bourgeois lawyer.
Asking an artist to talk about his work is like asking a plant to discuss horticulture.
The day an actor is not required, the day no one is writing for you, is when you're actually dead… That's a very scary moment.
Where art thou, Muse, that thou forget'st so long / To speak of that which gives thee all thy might?
People expect things from art that are horrible for us who make it! They put the things we make in these restrictive places called 'museums,' then don't want to hear another word from us.
When Rimbaud became a slave trader, he stopped writing poetry.
It's always hopeless to talk about painting - one never does anything but talk around it.
When someone gets passed that mic, and they know deep down inside that they wanna say something or sing something or produce something, but they don't do that, it's like killing your musical life.
An artist cannot speak about his art any more than a plant can discuss horticulture.
I find it very difficult to talk about unwritten works. It's never useful to start putting words casually around the flimsiest of notions. I finished Saturday only in late November and I'm now in the rather pleasant stage of traveling, reading and waiting.
It's a waste to not say anything with art.
A musical theme once exhausted, finds its due refuge and repose in silence.
Homer and Shakespeare and Milton and Marvell and Wordsworth are but the rustling of leaves and crackling of twigs in the forest, and there is not yet the sound of any bird. The Muse has never lifted up her voice to sing.
