Top 39 Robert Pinsky Quotes

#1. The wonderful 17th Century poet, Robert Herrick, wrote a poem entitled, 'To Live Merrily and to Trust to Good Verses.' Easy to say, Robert Herrick; not always easy to do. But it's a good slogan, I think.

Robert Pinsky

Robert Pinsky Quotes #850
#2. Deciding to remember, and what to remember, is how we decide who we are.

Robert Pinsky

Robert Pinsky Quotes #64755
#3. New Jersey is the most poetic state: close enough to New York to be urban and cosmopolitan, far enough to be desirous and unsure; densely populated, but full of farms and woods, with the most deer of any state.

Robert Pinsky

Robert Pinsky Quotes #152234
#4. The poetry I love is written with someone's voice and I believe its proper culmination is to be read with someone's voice. And the human voice in that sense is not electronically reproduced or amplified.

Robert Pinsky

Robert Pinsky Quotes #159306
#5. When I was a kid, there was unhappiness in my family - was dealt with partly by escaping to television. And from a very early age, for whatever reason, I became scornful and resistant to and angry about that. And some other time in my life, I realized that there's a lot I loved in television.

Robert Pinsky

Robert Pinsky Quotes #165199
#6. For an American, there's no automatic place where people love the art of poetry. There's not a social class that considers poetry its property the way in some countries there's a snob value to the art.

Robert Pinsky

Robert Pinsky Quotes #223774
#7. Sometimes the ideas that mean the most to you will feel true long before you can quite formulate them or justify them.

Robert Pinsky

Robert Pinsky Quotes #239196
#8. I love form, but I'm not interested in forms. I've never written a sonnet or villanelle or sestina or any of that. For me, it's a kind of line. It's a rhythm. It's something musical.

Robert Pinsky

Robert Pinsky Quotes #257035
#9. Autobiography is a genre notorious for falsehood.

Robert Pinsky

Robert Pinsky Quotes #316010
#10. I think art is not an ornament or refinement at the fringes of human intelligence, I think it's at the center. It's at the core.

Robert Pinsky

Robert Pinsky Quotes #367162
#11. The medium of poetry is a human body: the column of air inside the chest, shaped into signifying sounds in the larynx and the mouth. In this sense, poetry is just as physical or bodily an art as dancing.

Robert Pinsky

Robert Pinsky Quotes #372482
#12. I am a frustrated saxophone player. If I could, I would abandon all of my books, and I would trade it all if I could play the way people I admire play.

Robert Pinsky

Robert Pinsky Quotes #476643
#13. Poetry is the most bodily of the arts.

Robert Pinsky

Robert Pinsky Quotes #510692
#14. Jazz and poetry both involve a structure that may be familiar and to some extent predictable. And then, you try to create as much surprise and spontaneity and feeling and variation while respecting that structure.

Robert Pinsky

Robert Pinsky Quotes #519974
#15. Poetry's medium is not merely light as air, it is air: vital and deep as ordinary breath.

Robert Pinsky

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#16. An artist needs not so much an audience, as to feel a need to answer, a promise to respond ... a good feeling about his art.

Robert Pinsky

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#17. If what you want to do is make good art, decide what's good and try to imitate it.

Robert Pinsky

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#18. An underestimated element in poetry, that reading aloud makes clear, is the pause. I mean especially the force of a pause or a couple of pauses close together, contrasted with a longer unit of grammar.

Robert Pinsky

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#19. Art will not solve your problems. It will not enable you to live merrily.

Robert Pinsky

Robert Pinsky Quotes #815070
#20. If a poem is written well, it was written with the poet's voice and for a voice. Reading a poem silently instead of saying a poem is like the difference between staring at sheet music and actually humming or playing the music on an instrument.

Robert Pinsky

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#21. To talk about the reality of life here and the work that you do here at the university.

Robert Pinsky

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#22. Even in the scorched and frozen world of the dead after the
holocaust
The wheel as it turns goes on accreting ornaments.

Robert Pinsky

Robert Pinsky Quotes #946485
#23. The heart grows brutal feeding on fantasies.

Robert Pinsky

Robert Pinsky Quotes #1063177
#24. Poetry is a vocal art for me - but not necessarily a performative one. It might be reading to oneself or recalling some lines by memory.

Robert Pinsky

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#25. When I was a teenager, just about the only thing I could do right was play music. In my graduating class, I was certainly not voted 'Most Literary Boy.' I can assure you I was not voted 'Mostly Likely to Succeed.' I was voted 'Most Musical Boy.' And the music led to the poetry.

Robert Pinsky

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#26. The medium of poetry is not words, the medium of poetry is not lines-it is the motion of air inside the human body, coming out through the chest and the voice box and through the mouth to shape sounds that have meaning. It's bodily.

Robert Pinsky

Robert Pinsky Quotes #1226462
#27. Poetry is not easy. Or should I say, real poetry is not easy.

Robert Pinsky

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#28. Whatever makes a child want to glue macaroni on a paper plate and paint the assemblage and see it on the refrigerator - that has always been strong in me.

Robert Pinsky

Robert Pinsky Quotes #1302142
#29. Poetic language is singularly appropriate for recounting the life of the king who is traditionally accepted as the author of the poetic psalms, some of which are included in the narrative.

Robert Pinsky

Robert Pinsky Quotes #1326318
#30. Method involves a slavish addiction to laws, and we can only aspire to anarchy.

Robert Pinsky

Robert Pinsky Quotes #1340894
#31. I'm far from immune to the American, perhaps historically male, prejudice toward practical and physical competence; I hope I've also considered that prejudice enough to have some distance from it.

Robert Pinsky

Robert Pinsky Quotes #1378761
#32. I delight sometimes in saying to - as when I'm a teacher, I love saying, 'This is really important, so don't write it down.' To me, what you retain is a very important filter.

Robert Pinsky

Robert Pinsky Quotes #1415876
#33. In the particular presence of memorable language we can find a reminder of our ability to know and retain knowledge itself: the brightness wherein all things come to see.

Robert Pinsky

Robert Pinsky Quotes #1531459
#34. In jazz, as in poetry, there is always that play between what's regular and what's wild. That has always appealed to me.

Robert Pinsky

Robert Pinsky Quotes #1615137
#35. 'Write' is almost the wrong verb for what I do. I think 'compose' is more accurate because you're trying to make the sounds in your mind and in your voice. So I compose while I'm driving or in the shower.

Robert Pinsky

Robert Pinsky Quotes #1700728
#36. If I live near a dancer or a painter, or a clarinet player comes from my neighborhood, I take some pleasure in that, feel a little more as if I come from someplace in particular.

Robert Pinsky

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#37. I don't like to have a calm, orderly, quiet place to work. I often compose while driving, compose in my head. It is true that I wrote my little book, 'The Sounds of Poetry, A Brief Guide,' almost entirely in airplanes and airport departure lounges.

Robert Pinsky

Robert Pinsky Quotes #1732350
#38. For Aliki Barnstone, poetry seems a natural medium. The vision and cadences of these poems suggest a sensibility for which poetry is as inevitable as breathing or eating.

Robert Pinsky

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#39. Poetry's medium is the individual chest and throat and mouth of whoever undertakes to say the poem.

Robert Pinsky

Robert Pinsky Quotes #1749462

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