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"I'd like to think the scientists need us - but do they? Did Newton need Blake?"
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"The role of a writer is not to say what we all can say, but what we are unable to say."

"Never to rush something I was creating, but instead let it come into being as if it had a soul of it's own."

"A poet is someone who never forgets they were born naked."

"For art to exist, for any sort of aesthetic activity or perception to exist, a certain physiological precondition is indispensable: intoxication."

"On the whole, stories don't write themselves."

"The first time I saw a mermaid in my dream, and she looked so real...THAT.'s fishy!!"

"Be an artist, in whatever little faculty possible.For the Earth, without 'Art' is just 'Eh"

"What doesn't kill me provides writing material."

"Let's pursue the visage of imagination."

"Imagination is the creative force that through necessity yields solutions to resolve the issues that face us."
Explore more quotes by James Merrill

"Knowing some Greek helped defuse forbidding words - not that I counted much on using them. You'll find only trace elements of this language in the poem."

"He puts his right hand lightly on the cup, I put my left, leaving the right free to transcribe, and away we go. We get, oh, 500 to 600 words an hour. Better than gasoline."

"At college I'd seen my dead frog's limbs twitch under some applied stimulus or other - seen, but hadn't believed. Didn't dream of thinking beyond or around what I saw."

"Arthur Young's Reflexive Universe - fascinating but too schematic to fit into my scheme. The most I could hope for was a sense of the vocabulary and some possible images."

"But those two plays left me on fresh terms with language. I didn't always have to speak in my own voice."

"And, as I have said, it's made me think twice about the imagination. If the spirits aren't external, how astonishing the mediums become! Victor Hugo said of his voices that they were like his own mental powers multiplied by five."

"Strange about parents. We have such easy access to them and such daunting problems of communication."
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