Något av det viktigaste i all konst: att överlåta en anständig del åt läsaren, betraktaren, den medverkande. Det ska finnas en tom plats vid det dukade bordet. Den är hans.

I’m an artist. I’m a cave painter. Archaeologists and art critics of the future are going to call me a genius. They’re going to say I was so far ahead of my time that I was way behind my time.

Artists can have greater access to reality; they can see patterns and details and connections that other people, distracted by the blur of life, might miss. Just sharing that truth can be a very powerful thing.

Often the inspiration to write music comes from the voices in your head. You’re not crazy. Just be thankful they are not making you rescue people in 20-degree weather at 2:30 in the morning in the forest.

Painting completed my life. I lost three children and a series of other things that would have fulfilled my horrible life. My painting took the place of all this. I think work is the best. (Frida Kahlo, p. 157)

You can't memorize poetry and stay a fake. Sooner or later, you start to understand what these poets are saying, and it makes you feel life has something quite special, with certain layers of meaning to it.

People want to be bowled over by something special. Nine times out of ten you might strike out, but that tenth time, that peak experience, is what people want. That's what can move the world. That's art.

You kind of attribute this magic to music and as you meet the people you realize that they don’t contain the magic. They just channel it a little bit sometimes, but they never possess it. They never own it.

They stood, a family, and walked out of the mall, into the sunlight, seeking to rearrange the shape of their surroundings, to blow something up and watch all the tiny pieces resettle around them like falling snow.

An artist owed a duty to nothing except his own irresponsibility. It was OK for an artist to frolic in the water, no matter how bloody the waves or how high the tide rose. An ethicist had an obligation to drown.

No man has the right to dictate what other men should perceive, create or produce, but all should be encouraged to reveal themselves, their perceptions and emotions, and to build confidence in the creative spirit.

Art is creative for the sake of realization, not for amusement: for transfiguration, not for the sake of play. It is the quest of our self that drives us along the eternal and never-ending journey we must all make.

drugged to sleep by repetition of the diurnalround, the monotonous sorrow of the finite,within       I am awakerepairing in dirt the frayed immaculate threadforced by being to watch the birth of suns

To be a poet, I realized, a true poet, was to become the Avatar of humanity incarnate; to accept the mantle of poet is to carry the cross of the Son of Man, to suffer the birth pangs of the Soul-Mother of Humanity.

Cannot it actually be that in a wildly literal sense, unacceptable to one's reason, he meant disappearing in his art, dissolving in his verse, thus leaving of himself, of his nebulous person, nothing but verse?