It is not possible for an artist to be a success.
— James Baldwin, in this 1975 interview (youtube) which was mentioned in Small Rain (2024) by Garth Greenwell (Chapter 1, p. 43)
It was one of my favorite poems, authorless, mysterious, the first two lines unparsable:
Westron wynde, when wyll thow blow, The smalle rayne downe can Rayne, a sentence with a broken back. [...]... could he be longing for death, I would ask them, is he at that pitch of extremity; and what is the small rain, isn't it beautiful, the weird adjective, how can rain be small; and does he want it, the speaker of the poem, does he long for the rain, is that how we should understand the cracked syntax; and isn't the poem more beautiful for it, for the difficulty, for the way we can't quite make sense of it, settled sense, I mean, for how it won't stay still; isn't the non-sense what makes it bottomless, what lets us pour and pour our attention into it, what makes it not just a message - though it is a message, I would say to them, all art is a message, we want to communicate something but maybe not an entirely graspable something, maybe there's a kind of sense only non-sense can convey; so that the poem becomes not just a message but an object of contemplation, of devotion even, inexhaustible.
— from Small Rain (2024) by Garth Greenwell, Chapter 1, p. 46
The object in discourse assumes an exalted place.
— from Writing Degree Zero (1953) by Roland Barthes which i read in this New Yorker article from 2017 about Gunnhild Øyehaug
Nobody can express your feelings like you can yourself. You are the best artist.
— Koos Looijesteijn in this article which was shared on town bink & which made me make this page, thank :D