Quotes by Zbigniew Herbert

You can be a good painter if you study Cézannes vision. Whoever dares to copy Van Gogh falls inevitably into the hell of imitators. For this painter didnt care about masterpieces, or even good paintings... but about what is beyond all painting, all art.

Very early on, near the beginning of my writing life, I came to believe that I had to seize on some object outside of literature. Writing as a sylistic exercise seemed barren to me. Poetry as the art of the word made me yawn. I also understood that I couldnt sustain myself very long on the poems of others. I had to go out from myself and literature, look around in the world and lay hold of other spheres of reality.