Source: The Year of Magical Thinking
“I do physics in order to earn my living, and I do poetry in order to keep alive.”
Interview with The New York Times https://nyti.ms/2Uzw2nh, June 27, 1968, p. 49
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Nicanor Parra 3
writer, poet, matematician, fisic 1914–2018Related quotes
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
(1772–1834) English poet, literary critic and philosopher
12 July 1827
Table Talk (1821–1834)
E.M. Forster
(1879–1970) English novelist
Source: Commonplace Book (1985), p. 224
Context: Going to Bits. This phrase me to day and is indeed the one I have been looking for; not tragic, not mortal disintegration; only a central weakness which prevents me from concentrating or settling down I have so wanted to write and write ahead. The phrase "obligatory creation" has haunted me. I have so wanted to get out of my morning bath promptly: have decided to do so beforehand, and have then lain in it as usual and watched myself not getting out. It looks as if there is a physical as well as a moral break in the orders I send out. I have plenty of interesting thoughts but keep losing them like the post cards I have written, or like my cap. I can't clear anything up yet interrupt a 'good read' in order to clear up. I hope tomorrow to copy out a piece of someone else's pose: it is the best device known to me for taking one out of inself, Plunge into anothers minutiae.' 31-1-61
Robert Pinsky
(1940) American poet, editor, literary critic, academic.
Poetry and the World, Ecco Press,1988
“I am always doing that which I can not do, in order that I may learn how to do it.”
Pablo Picasso
(1881–1973) Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, and stage designer
Attributed in Civilization's Quotations : Life's Ideal (2002) by Richard Alan Krieger, p. 132, and many places on the internet, this was actually stated by Vincent van Gogh in a letter to Anthon van Rappard http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthon_van_Rappard (18 August 1885) http://vangoghletters.org/vg/letters/let528/letter.html, also rendered "I keep on making what I can’t do yet in order to learn to be able to do it."
Misattributed
Variant: I am always doing that which I cannot do, in order that I may learn how to do it.
“I am always doing what I cannot do yet, in order to learn how to do it.”
Vincent Van Gogh
(1853–1890) Dutch post-Impressionist painter (1853-1890)
“Music is what I breathe, what I love to do. It keeps me alive.”
Miley Cyrus
(1992) American actor and singer-songwriter
Aegistheus, Act 2
The Flies (1943)
Colm Tóibín
(1955) Irish novelist and writer
World of Colm Tóibín, writer http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/authorinterviews/9108553/World-of-Colm-Toibin-writer.html, The Daily Telegraph (27 February 2012)
