The Nobel Prize in Literature 1996

The world has always been a sorry and confused sort of place—yet poets and artists and scientists have ignored the factors that would, if attended to, paralyze them.

To be an artist is this: not to count or to reckon: to ripen like a tree which does not force its sap, but in the storms of spring stands confident without being afraid that afterwards no summer may come. The summer comes all right. But it only comes to the patient, to those who are there as carefree and quiet and immense, as if eternity lay before

... See more

In unpredictable times, poetry leaves the safe, familiar ways of knowing and speaking and listens out into new forms of being and creating. It searches for new insights between the known, it fathoms the space between people, between us and the living world, between different ways of seeing and shaping the world. It listens for new ways of being tha... See more

Bob Dylan on the otherworldliness of creativity (2004) “I don’t know how I got to write those songs. Those early songs were almost magically written.” It is reminiscent of how mathematical discoveries tend to speak themselves—not to the experienced—but to the young. Show more