The poet's business is not to describe things to us, or to tell us about things, but to create in our minds the very things themselves.

-Abercrombie, Lascelles
  Poetry: Its Music and Meaning, introduction.

Il n'existe que trois e"  tres respectables: le pre"  tre, le guerrier, le poe'  te. Savoir, tuer et cre¤  er. There are only three respectable beings: priest, warrior, poet. To know, to kill and to create.

-Baudelaire, Charles
  Mon coeur mis a'   nu, pt.22.

To create is first of all to destroy†there is and can be no such thing as authentic art until the bons trucs (whereby we are taught to see and imitate on canvas and in stone and by words this so-called world) are entirely and

-cummings, e e pen name of  Edward Estlin Cummings

Un romancier, selon moi, n'a pas le droit de dire son avis sur les choses de ce monde. Il doit, dans sa vocation, imiter Dieu dans la sienne, c'est-a'  -dire faire et se taire. A novelist, in my opinion, does not have the right to give advice on the affairs of the world. He must, in his occupation, imitate God in His; that is to say, create and keep quiet.

-Flaubert, Gustave
  Letter to Mlle Bosquet.

Now, our music is universal. It shares the rhythmic content of African music, music of the Western Hemisphere and various lands of the East, and has merged this rhythm with European harmonies, the soul of the slaves, the blues, and the spirituals to create jazz.

-Gillespie, Dizzy (John Birks)
  Dizzy ^ To Be Or Not To Bop (with  Al Fraser),'Evolutions'.

The product oftheartist hasbecome less importantthan the fact of the artist.We wish to absorb this person.We wish to devour someone who has experienced the tragic.Inour society thisperson ismuchmore important than anything he might create.

-Mamet, David Alan
  Writing in Restaurants,'Exuvial Magic:  An Essay Concerning Magic'.

The absence of the urge to create is decadence.

-Mamet, David Alan
  Writing in Restaurants,'Decadence'.

Finnegans Wake took him seventeen years to write, a length of time that suggests an elaborate hobby rather than a passionate desire to create something.

-Priestley,J(ohn) B(oynton)
  Of James Joyce. Literature andWestern Man.