Words from Others on this Topic

Someone once asked me why people sing. I answered they sing for many of the same reasons birds sing. They sing for a mate, to claim their territory, or simply to give voice to the delight of being alive in the midst of a beautiful day. Perhaps more than birds do, humans hold a grudge. They sing to complain of how grievously they have been wronged, and how to avoid it in the future. They sing to help themselves execute a job of work. They sing so the subsequent generations won’t forget what the current generation endured, or dreamed, or delighted in.

Linda Ronstadt, 1968, from the interview “in a friend's East Village apartment, NYC”

At this point, I’m in the middle of a very long conversation with my audience.

It’s an ongoing dialogue about what living means. You create a space together. You are involved in an act of the imagination together, imagining the life you want to live, the kind of country you want to live in, the kind of place you want to leave to your children. What are the things that bring you ecstasy and bliss, what are the things that bring on the darkness, and what can we do together to combat those things? That’s the dialogue I have in my imagination when I’m writing. I have it in front of me when I’m performing.

Bruce Springsteen, 05 Jan 2009, from the interview “Springsteen Interview with Rolling Stone in 2007”

View’d, to-day, from a point of view sufficiently over-arching, the problem of humanity all over the civilized world is social and religious, and is to be finally met and treated by literature. The priest departs, the divine literatus comes. Never was anything more wanted than, to-day, and here in the States, the poet of the modern is wanted, or the great literatus of the modern.

Walt Whitman, 1871, from the essay “Democratic Vistas”

This will be our reply to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before.

Leonard Bernstein

To me, the only habit worth “designing for” is the habit of questioning one’s habitual ways of seeing, and that is what artists, writers, and musicians help us to do…. It’s in the realm of poetics that we learn how to encounter. Significantly, these encounters are not optimized to “empower us” by making us happier or more productive. In fact, they may actually completely unsettle the priorities of the productive self and even the boundaries between self and other. Rather than providing us with drop-down menus, they confront us with serious questions, the answering of which may change us irreversibly.

Jenny Odell, 2019, from the book How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy

Poetry is… words that are empowered that make your hair stand on end… that you recognize instantly as being some form of subjective truth that has an objective reality to it… because somebody’s realized it.

Allen Ginsberg, 2005, from the film No Direction Home

Art is not a mirror held up to reality, but a hammer with which to shape it.

Bertolt Brecht

The excitement we derive from a work of art is mostly the excitement of seeing connections that did not exist before, of seeing quite different aspects of life unified through a pattern.

Anthony Burgess, 1974, from the book English Literature: A Survey for Students

I really believe that art is capable of the total transformation of the world, and of life itself, and nothing less is really acceptable. So I mean if art is going to have any excuse for – beyond being a leisure-class plaything – it has to transform life itself.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

It’s all the reasons why human psychology will never be fully explained or pictured by scientific investigation — there are just too many variables, too many vectors pressing in on every incident. It’s the reason why storytelling and songwriting and poetry-making will always be so much more effective organizers and vehicles of our experience than studies in social science.

Adam Gopnik, 2024, from the book All That Happiness Is

Men are not suffering from the lack of good literature, good art, good theatre, good music, but from that which has made it impossible for these to become manifest. In short, they are suffering from the silent, shameful conspiracy (the more shameful since it is unacknowledged) which has bound them together as enemies of art and artist. They are suffering from the fact that art is not the primary moving force in their lives. They are suffering from the act, repeated daily, of keeping up the pretense that they can go their way, lead their lives, without art.

Henry Miller, 1957, from the book Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch