I was influenced by surrealist poetry and painting as were thousands of other people and it seems to me to have become a part of the way I write but it's not.

I was excited by what my painter friends were doing and they seemed to be interested in our poetry too and that was a wonderful little fizzy sort of world.

American poetry like American painting is always personal with an emphasis on the individuality of the poet.

Art works because it appeals to certain faculties of the mind. Music depends on details of the auditory system painting and sculpture on the visual system. Poetry and literature depend on language.

Slowly poetry becomes visual because it paints images but it is also musical: it unites two arts into one.

Painting is silent poetry and poetry is painting that speaks.

I always pet a dog with my left hand because if he bit me I'd still have my right hand to paint with.

I build a kind of wall between myself and t he model so that I can paint in peace behind it. Otherwise she might say something that confuses and distracts me.

The business of peace requires more than showing up with paint brushes foodstuffs and an oil pipeline or two.

To say to the painter that Nature is to be taken as she is is to say to the player that he may sit on the piano.

I am following Nature without being able to grasp her I perhaps owe having become a painter to flowers.

Painting will have to deal more fully and less obliquely with life and nature's phenomena before it can again become great.

My aim in painting has always been the most exact transcription possible of my most intimate impression of nature.

Painting from nature is not copying the object it is realizing one's sensations.

An architect should live as little in cities as a painter. Send him to our hills and let him study there what nature understands by a buttress and what by a dome.

For an Impressionist to paint from nature is not to paint the subject but to realize sensations.

It is not the language of painters but the language of nature which one should listen to the feeling for the things themselves for reality is more important than the feeling for pictures.

I perhaps owe having become a painter to flowers.

When I have a terrible need of - shall I say the word - religion. Then I go out and paint the stars.

Writing has laws of perspective of light and shade just as painting does or music. If you are born knowing them fine. If not learn them. Then rearrange the rules to suit yourself.

My horizon on humanity is enlarged by reading the writers of poems seeing a painting listening to some music some opera which has nothing at all to do with a volatile human condition or struggle or whatever. It enriches me as a human being.

There are certain things in which mediocrity is not to be endured such as poetry music painting public speaking.

Once music ceases to be ephemeral - always disappearing - and becomes instead material... it leaves the condition of traditional music and enters the condition of painting. It becomes a painting existing as material in space not immaterial in time.

That's why people listen to music or look at paintings. To get in touch with that wholeness.