What It Means to Be a Poet in America (1926)
Context: Whenever I begin to write a poem or draw a picture I am, in imagination, if not in reality, back in my room where I began to draw pen-and-ink pictures and write verses in my seventeenth year. Both windows of the room look down on the great Governor’s Yard of Illinois. This yard is a square block, a beautiful park. Our house is on so high a hill I can always look down upon the governor. Among my very earliest memories are those of seeing old Governor Oglesby leaning on his cane, marching about, calling his children about him.
“I began drawing when I was one and a half years old. I never stopped.”
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Tomasz Vetulani 18
Polish artist 1965Related quotes
“I have never learned to draw a hand well enough, so why should I stop trying now?”
Selden Rodman, Conversations With Artists, 1956.
Source: Either/Or: A Fragment of Life
“When I was born I was so surprised I didn't talk for a year and a half.”
It was really very touching.
Chris Chase, "A Talk With the Unsinkable Barbara Walters", New York Magazine (March 25, 1974), Vol. 7, No. 12, p. 62.
Breakfast of Champions (1973)
Context: I was on par with the Creator of the Universe there in the dark in the cocktail lounge. I shrunk the Universe to a ball exactly one light-year in diameter. I had it explode. I had it disperse itself again.
Ask me a question, any question. How old is the Universe? It is one half-second old, but the half-second has lasted one quintillion years so far. Who created it? Nobody created it. It has always been here.
What is time? It is a serpent which eats its tail, like this:
This is the snake which uncoiled itself long enough to offer Eve the apple, which looked like this:
What was the apple which Eve and Adam ate? It was the Creator of the Universe.
And so on.
Symbols can be so beautiful, sometimes.
“I'm 83, and I feel like a 20-year-old, but unfortunately there's never one around.”
Interview for It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World
Variant: I would prove to the men how mistaken they are in thinking that they no longer
fall in love when they grow old--not knowing that they grow old when they stop
falling in love.