I guess the two Manifesto Communicating Vessels Mad Love and some of his poetry made a significant mark on me but as far as bringing a literary element into the music I see it as a much broader assimilation.

I think it comes from really liking literary forms. Poetry is very beautiful but the space on the page can be as affecting as where the text is. Like when Miles Davis doesn't play it has a poignancy to it.

Poetry seems to have been eliminated as a literary genre and installed instead as a kind of spiritual aerobic exercise - nobody need read it but anybody can do it.

Science fiction outside of poetry is the only literary field which has no limits no parameters whatsoever.

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.

I often imagine that the longer he studies English literature the more the Japanese student must be astonished at the extraordinary predominance given to the passion of love both in fiction and in poetry.

It is true that short forms of poetry have been cultivated in the Far East more than in modern Europe but in all European literature short forms of poetry are to be found - indeed quite as short as anything in Japanese.

That sense of a life in natural objects which in most poetry is but a rhetorical artifice was then in Wordsworth the assertion of what was for him almost literal fact.

Cut quarrels out of literature and you will have very little history or drama or fiction or epic poetry left.

Poetry is the most subtle of the literary arts and students grow more ingenious by the year at avoiding it. If they can nip around Milton duck under Blake and collapse gratefully into the arms of Jane Austen a lot of them will.

Instead of trying to come up and pontificate on what literature is you need to talk with children to teachers and make sure they get poetry in the curriculum early.

I did not have a very literary background. I came to poetry from the sciences and mathematics and also through an interest in Japanese and Chinese poetry in translation.

Every American poet feels that the whole responsibility for contemporary poetry has fallen upon his shoulders that he is a literary aristocracy of one.

The crown of literature is poetry.

The Bible should be taught but emphatically not as reality. It is fiction myth poetry anything but reality. As such it needs to be taught because it underlies so much of our literature and our culture.

To make a love story you need a couple of young people but to reflect on the nature of love you're better off with old ones. That is a fact of life and literature - and of the novel ever since it fell in love with love in the 18th century.

It is the nature of the artist to mind excessively what is said about him. Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.

Pop changes week to week month to month. But great music is like literature.

Through literacy you can begin to see the universe. Through music you can reach anybody. Between the two there is you unstoppable.

Develop interest in life as you see it in people things literature music - the world is so rich simply throbbing with rich treasures beautiful souls and interesting people. Forget yourself.

There's a lot of music that sounds like it's literally computer-generated totally divorced from a guy sitting down at an instrument.

When you kill somebody in the movies it matters whereas in literature it can be allegorical.

Well the thing about great fictional characters from literature and the reason that they're constantly turned into characters in movies is that they completely speak to what makes people human.

I was at the end of the studio system so when I walked into movies I had a magnificent suite in which I had a living room and a kitchen and a complete makeup room. I had everything just for me. With the independents you're kind of roughing it literally.