A Quote by Kenneth Coutts-Smith

The revelatory or visionary is the province of the 'private' artist, who in order to render his personal world comprehensible or even tolerable, must force others to believe in it and therefore share it. It is said that 'the poet does not wish to be understood, but to be believed.
If the poet wants to be a poet, the poet must force the poet to revise. If the poet doesn't wish to revise, let the poet abandon poetry and take up stamp-collecting or real estate.
I have heard it very often said that an artist does not need intelligence, that his is the province of the soul
People probably long for something genuinely personal in a society where the personal is often indistinguishable from the "personalized." Maybe the poetry audience member is searching for his or her own "personal space" and they expect the poet to be a sort of avatar of the private life. But that sort of representation is distasteful to me. Asking a poet to represent the personal life is, paradoxically, to turn the poet into something other than a person.
The artist seeks contact with his intuitive sense of the gods, but in order to create his work, he cannot stay in this seductive and incorporeal realm. He must return to the material world in order to do his work. It's the artist's responsibility to balance mystical communication and the labor of creation.
Let the poet dream his dreams. Yet, the poet must look at the world; must enter into other men's lives; must look at the earth and the sky, must examine the dust in the street; must walk through the world and his mirror.
A poet's mission is to make others confound fiction and reality in order to render them, for an hour, mysteriously happy.
Leonard [Nimoy] was such a teacher for me. He was one of the most fully realized human beings I have ever known on every level - in his personal life with his personal relationships and his love for his wife and his evolution with his family. Then as an artist, as an actor, as a writer, as a poet, and as a photographer. He never stopped.
The critic, to interpret his artist, even to understand his artist, must be able to get into the mind of his artist; he must feel and comprehend the vast pressure of the creative passion.
If you wish to feign confusion in order to lure the enemy on, you must first have perfect discipline; if you wish to display timidity in order to entrap the enemy, you must have extreme courage; if you wish to parade your weakness in order to make the enemy over-confident, you must have exceeding strength.
There is a happiness in Deism, when rightly understood, that is not to be found inany other system of religion. All other systems have something in them that either shock our reason, or are repugnant to it, and man, if he thinks at all, must stifle his reason in order to force himself to believe them.
You should understand that private faith does not force public decisions. That's how you work at compromise. I haven't given up what I believe, but I live in community - in a city, state, nation, and world - with people who don't believe what I believe. That doesn't make them defective or inferior.
Good manners can render even virtue tolerable.
It is with art as with love: How can a man of the world,with all his distractions, keep the inwardness which an artist must possess if he hopes to attain perfection? That inwardness which the spectator must share if he is to understand the work as the artist wishes and hopes... Believe me, talents are like virtues; either you must love them for their own sake or renounce them altogether. And they are only recognized and rewarded when we have practised them in secret, like a dangerous mystery."
In order to be artists we need to be in our studios, in our private rooms... in our private personal space... that sacred protected space, so we can make our work. That's the only work that's worth making, right? That's the place where we can be free enough and vulnerable enough to share what we have to share.
In order for me to be successful... In order to be a great artist - musician, actor, painter, whatever - you must be able to be private in public at all times. That is what we do.
We intend freedom and justice to conquer. Yes, we do have a creed and we wish others to share it. But it is not part of our policy to impose our beliefs by force or threat of force.
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