P-Q-R Quotations
Thomas Paine
What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly; it is dearness only that gives every thing its value.
Chuck Palahniuk
The only way to find true happiness is to risk being completely cut open.
It's so hard to forget pain, but it's even harder to remember sweetness. We have no scar to show for happiness. We learn so little from peace.
It’s easy to attack and destroy an act of creation. It’s a lot more difficult to perform one.
Grace Paley
Luckily for art, life is difficult, hard to understand, useless, and mysterious.
Let us go forth with fear and courage and rage to save the world.
Hannah Sanghee Park
Poetry is all about precision and concision, and a good piece of screenwriting hits on both of those things: how do you convey an image in as few words as possible, as sharply and starkly as possible?
It would be ideal if a poem can be both widely accessible and intimate.
I follow the element of surprise. I see a word like a Russian nesting doll. How can I strip it to what its imagined core would be? That’s what I’m trying to go to.
Dorothy Parker
I hate writing, I love having written.
The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity.
Creativity is a wild mind and a disciplined eye.
I hate almost all rich people, but I think I'd be darling at it.
Louis Pasteur
Chance favors the prepared mind.
Ann Patchett
The ability to forgive oneself . . . is the key to making art, and very possibly the key to finding any semblance of happiness in life.
Kathleen Patel
With ignorance comes fear – from fear comes bigotry. Education is the key to acceptance.
Shailja Patel
As an artist I move toward the forms that move me. I’ve been a poet from childhood. When I migrated to the United States and discovered slam, it blew me away, so I immersed myself in it. When I began to write pieces that were too long and complex to slam, theater was the natural space to move into. Now I’ve come full circle to writing again, making work—books, poems, political essays—that migrate freely across continents and languages, independent of my physical body.
Anna Pavlova
To follow, without halt, one's aim: That's the secret of success.
Octavio Paz
Touched by poetry, language is more fully language and at the same time is no longer language: it is a poem.
Art is an invention of aesthetics, which in turn is an invention of philosophers . . . what we call art is a game.
To read a poem is to hear it with our eyes; to hear it is to see it with our ears.
I don' think we can have a good society if we don't have good poetry.
We are condemned to kill time, thus we die bit by bit.
Literature is the expression of a feeling of deprivation, a recourse against a sense of something missing. But the contrary is also true: language is what makes us human. It is a recourse against the meaningless noise and silence of nature and history.
Joseph Chilton Pearce
To live a creative life, we must lose our fear of being wrong.
Craig Santos Perez
I started as an artist and poetry in particular became a way for me to explore various issues: political issues, family issues, and things like that. As I learned more about these issues through art, that became part of my activism. Poetry is a powerful way to become involved in activism and it’s a great creative outlet to express one’s politics . . . I teach students how poetry and activism can be powerful parts of our lives and can help us learn about different subjects in a more creative and community-engagement capacity.
Literature, activism, and education are always collaborative projects.
Lynne Perrella
My goal is to maintain the same excitement and uncluttered instincts about making art that I felt in childhood.
Irene Peter
Just because everything is different doesn't mean anything has changed.
Pablo Picasso
Inspiration exists, but it has to find you working.
Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist.
Everything you can imagine is real.
There are painters who transform the sun to a yellow spot, but there are others who with the help of their art and their intelligence, transform a yellow spot into sun.
Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.
Only put off until tomorrow what you are willing to die having left undone.
Mary Pickford
You may have a fresh start any moment you choose, for this thing that we call ‘failure’ is not the falling down, but the staying down.
Jodi Picoult
You can always edit a bad page. You can't edit a blank page.
Peace Pilgrim
Anything you cannot relinquish when it has outlived its usefulness possesses you, and in this materialistic age a great many of us are possessed by our possessions.
Victor Pinchuk
Art, freedom and creativity will change society faster than politics.
Albert Pine
What we do for ourselves dies with us. What we do for others and the world remains and is immortal.
Harold Pinter
Good writing excites me, and makes life worth living.
Sylvia Plath
And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.
I don't know what it is like to not have deep emotions. Even when I feel nothing, I feel it completely.
Plato
At the touch of love everyone becomes a poet.
Poetry is nearer to vital truth than history.
Arthur Plotnik
You write to communicate to the hearts and minds of others what's burning inside you, and we edit to let the fire show through the smoke.
Edgar Allan Poe
Every poem should remind the reader that they are going to die.
Poetry is the rhythmical creation of beauty in words.
Alexander Pope
Blessed is he who expects nothing, for he shall never be disappointed.
True ease in writing comes from art, not chance,
As those move easiest who have learn'd to dance.
To err is human, to forgive, divine.
I am his Highness' dog at Kew;
Pray tell me, sir, whose dog are you?
Charms strike the sight, but merit wins the soul.
Fools rush in where angels fear to tread.
Beatrix Potter
There is something delicious about writing the first words of a story. You never quite know where they'll take you.
Ezra Pound
Poetry is news that stays news.
Don’t imagine that the art of poetry is any simpler than the art of music, or that you can please the expert before you have spent at least as much effort on the art of verse as the average piano teacher spends on the art of music.
Be influenced by as many great artists as you can, but have the decency either to acknowledge the debt outright, or to try to conceal it.
Don’t allow “influence” to mean merely that you mop up the particular decorative vocabulary of some one or two poets whom you happen to admire.
Go in fear of abstractions. Don’t retell in mediocre verse what has already been done in good prose. Don’t think any intelligent person is going to be deceived when you try to shirk all the difficulties of the unspeakably difficult art of good prose by chopping your composition into line lengths.
An “Image” is that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time.
Terry Pratchett
There’s no such thing as writer’s block. That was invented by people in California who couldn’t write.
The first draft is just you telling yourself the story.
Light thinks it travels faster than anything but it is wrong. No matter how fast light travels, it finds the darkness has always got there first, and is waiting for it.
Annie Proulx
You should write because you love the shape of stories and sentences and the creation of different words on a page. Writing comes from reading, and reading is the finest teacher of how to write.
Curiosity is what drives me. I am interested in everything, and all the people I know and like have fierce passions for places and things. I never thought it was peculiar or abnormal to be this way when I was younger, but I've learnt differently. Most people are remarkably incurious.
Marcel Proust
Remembrance of things past is not necessarily the remembrance of things as they were.
Loreal Prystaj
As an artist, it is important to create work that genuinely comes from within. This is the only way that a new and unique point of view is found.
Salvatore Quasimodo
Poetry . . . is the revelation of a feeling that the poet believes to be interior and personal which the reader recognizes as his own.
Wu Qiao
When you write in prose, you cook the rice. When you write poetry, you turn rice into rice wine. Cooked rice doesn't change its shape, but rice wine changes both in quality and shape. Cooked rice makes one full so one can live out one's life span wine, on the other hand, makes one drunk, makes the sad happy, and the happy sad. Its effect is sublimely beyond explanation.
