Creativity and Inspiration

One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.

The marble not yet carved can hold the form of every thought the greatest artist has.

Words are to be taken seriously. I try to take seriously acts of language. Words set things in motion. I’ve seen them doing it. Words set up atmospheres, electrical fields, charges. I’ve felt them doing it. Words conjure. I try not to be careless about what I utter, write, sing. I’m careful about what I give voice to.

You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait, be quite still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.

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.

Draw a crazy picture, Write a nutty poem, Sing a mumble-gamble song, and Whistle through your comb.

There are works which wait, and which one does not understand for a long time; the reason is that they bring answers to questions which have not yet been raised; for the question often arrives a terribly long time after the answer.

Take a commonplace, clean it and polish it, light it so that it produces the same effect of youth and freshness and originality and spontaneity as it did originally, and you have done a poet’s job.

If poetry comes not as naturally as the leaves to a tree it had better not come at all.

His self and the sun were one And his poems, although makings of his self, Were no less makings of the sun.

The Possible’s slow fuse is lit By the Imagination.

The difference between the almost -right word& the right word is really a large matter—it’sthe difference between the lightning-bug & thelightning.

Genius too does nothing but learn first how to lay bricks then how to build, and continually seek for material and continually form itself around it.Every activity of man is amazingly complicated, not only that of the genius: but none is a ‘miracle.

What is originality? To see something that has no name as yet and hence cannot be mentioned although it stares us all in the face. The way men usually are, it takes a name to make something visible for them.

A great artist is always before his time or behind it.

Then, rising with Aurora’s light,

Artists are the antennae of the race.

What is genius—but the power of expressing a new individuality?

There are no mute, inglorious Miltons, save in the hallucinations of poets. The one sound test of a Milton is that he functions as a Milton.

Imagination! who can sing thy force?

I have put my genius into my life; I have put only my talent into my works.

Analysis kills spontaneity. The grain once ground into flour springs and germinates no more.

There is no subject so old that something new cannot be said about it.

You beat your pate, and fancy wit will come: