A Quote by Rick Riordan

You might as well ask an artist to explain his art, or ask a poet to explain his poem. It defeats the purpose. The meaning is only clear thorough the search.

Rick Riordan

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Art Artist Ask Clear Defeats Explain His Meaning Might Only Poem Poet Purpose Search Thorough Well

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Rick Riordan
American - Author
Born: June 5, 1964

Would you ask Picasso to explain 'Guernica?' Would you ask Nabokov to explain 'Lolita?' Would you ask Tolstoy about 'War and Peace?' No, you wouldn't dare.

Michael Cimino

I'm no financial expert. I scarcely know what a coin is. Ask me to explain what a credit default swap is, and I'll emit an unbroken 10-minute 'um' through the clueless face of a broken puppet. You might as well ask a pantomime horse.

Charlie Brooker

I think a good poem should have some inscrutable part. You can't quite explain it. The poem can only explain itself to a certain limit and at that point you enter into a little bit of mystery. That for me is the perfect poem: to begin in clarity and to end in mystery.

Billy Collins

Don't ask a poet to explain himself. He cannot.

Plato

A poet dares to be just so clear and no clearer; he approaches lucid ground warily, like a mariner who is determined not to scrape his bottom on anything solid. A poet's pleasure is to withhold a little of his meaning, to intensify by mystification. He unzips the veil from beauty, but does not remove it. A poet utterly clear is a trifle glaring.

E. B. White

In the eyes of others a man is a poet if he has written one good poem. In his own he is only a poet at the moment when he is making his last revision to a new poem. The moment before, he was still only a potential poet; the moment after, he is a man who has ceased to write poetry, perhaps forever.

W. H. Auden

I suspect that Jesus spoke many of his parables as a kind of sad and holy joke and that that may be part of why he seemed reluctant to explain them because if you have to explain a joke, you might as well save your breath.

Frederick Buechner

He has more of a right to ask us why so many people are starving [than we do to ask Him]. As much as we want God to explain himself to us, His creation, we are in no place to demand that He give an account to us.

Francis Chan

No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone.

T. S. Eliot

No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead.

T. S. Eliot

Whoever accepts the higher mission of art and comes nearer and nearer to it through his creative activity, will then go on from art to the Spirit deep within his own self... The philosophic search for enlightenment and the artist's search for perfection of work can meet and unite. Art can be a path to spiritual enlightenment but not to complete and lasting enlightenment. It can be born out of, and can give birth itself to, only Glimpses. For art is a search for beauty, which by itself is not enough. Beauty must be supported by virtue and both require wisdom to guide them.

Paul Brunton

The poet must work with brush and paper,but this is not what makes the poem. A man does not go in search of a poem - the poem comes in search of him.

Yang Wanli

The service members don't ask much of us. They ask to be well trained. They ask to be well equipped and they ask to be well led. And if something should happen to them, they ask that we take care of their families.

Brian Whitman

To do a poem justice, explain what makes it unique; to get a poem noticed, explain what makes it typical.

Stephen Burt

I want each poem to be ambiguous enough that its meaning can shift, depending on the reader's own frame of reference, and depending on the reader's mood. That's why negative capability matters; if the poet stops short of fully controlling each poem's meaning, the reader can make the poem his or her own.

James Arthur

If you want to annoy a poet, explain his poetry.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

A Quote by Rick Riordan

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