Others

I have bathed in the Poem

Beauty is nothing

The true nature of poetry. The drive to connect. The dream of a common language.

In a few generations you can breed a racehorse. The recipe for making a man like Delacroix is less well known.

I have a predilection for painting that lends joyousness to a wall.

It’s with my brush that I make love.

A few months ago I told the American people I did not trade arms for hostages. My heart and my best intentions still tell me that is true, but the facts and the evidence tell me it is not.

The day is not purer than the depths of my heart.

In reality every reader is, while he is reading, the reader of his own self. The writer’s work is merely a kind of optical instrument which he offers to the reader to enable him to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have perceived in himself.

The idea of Time was of value to me for yet another reason: it was a spur. . . . This life that we live in half-darkness can be illumined, this life that at every moment we distort can be restored to its true pristine shape, that a life, in short, can be realized within the confines of a book! How happy would be, I thought, the man who had the power to write such a book! What a task awaited him!

An artist has no need to express his thought directly in his work for the latter to reflect its quality; it has even been said that the highest praise of God consists in the denial of Him by the atheist who finds creation so perfect that it can dispense with a creator.

An artist has no need to express his thought directly in his work for the latter to reflect its quality; it has even been said that the highest praise of God consists in the denial of Him by the atheist who finds creation so perfect that it can dispense with a creator.

But the beauty is not the madness

Genius is the capacity to see ten things where the ordinary man sees one, and the man of talent sees two or three, PLUS the ability to register that multiple perception in the material of his art.

Hang it all, Robert Browning, there can be but the one “Sordello.”

Hang it all, Robert Browning, there can be but the one “Sordello.”

Lie quiet Divus.

We have one sap and one root—

I make a pact with you, Walt Whitman—

Objectivity and again objectivity, and expression: no hindside-before-ness, no straddled adjectives (“as addled mosses dank”), no Tennysonianness of speech; nothing—nothing that you couldn’t, in some circumstance, in the stress of some emotion, actually say.

Poetry is about as much a “criticism of life” as red-hot iron is a criticism of fire.

Poetry is about as much a “criticism of life” as red-hot iron is a criticism of fire.

If parts allure thee, think how Bacon shined,

There was a reviewer a while back who wrote that my pictures didn’t have any beginning or any end. He didn’t mean it as a compliment, but it was. It was a fine compliment.