Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App

" The spirit world doesn't admit to communicating with me, so it's fairly even. "

Related Quotes:

" I have a plot, but not much happens. "

" I never abandoned either forms or freedom. I imagine that most of what could be called free verse is in my first book. I got through that fairly early. "

" Write what you know. That should leave you with a lot of free time. "

" The historian is terribly responsible to what he can discern are the facts of the case, but he's nothing if he doesn't make out a case. "

" For a Jewish Puritan of the middle class, the novel is serious, the novel is work, the novel is conscientious application why, the novel is practically the retail business all over again. "

" A teacher is a person who never says anything once. "

" When I was starting to write, the great influence was T.S. Eliot and after that William Butler Yeats. "

" A lot happens by accident in poetry. "

" We're not in love with Literature all the time - especially when you have to teach it every day. "

" History is one of those marvelous and necessary illusions we have to deal with. It's one of the ways of dealing with our world with impossible generalities which we couldn't live without. "

" Occasionally a student writer comes up with something really beautiful and moving, and you won't know for years if it was an accident or the first burst of something wonderful. "

" When Robert Frost was alive, I was known as the other new England poet, which is to be barely known at all. "

" I've thought of the last line of some poems for years and tried them out, It wouldn't work because the last line was much too beautiful for the poem. "

" I would talk in iambic pentameter if it were easier. "

" I liked the kid who wrote me that he had to do a term paper on a modern poet and he was doing me because, though they say you have to read poems twice, he found he could handle mine in one try. "

" I think there's one thing which distinguishes our art - we don't consider. We don't think. We write a little verse because it comes to us. "

" The nice thing about the Bible is it doesn't give you too many facts. Two an a half lines and it tells you the whole story and that leaves you a great deal of freedom to elaborate on how it might have happened. "

" Nothing in the universe can travel at the speed of light, they say, forgetful of the shadow's speed. "

" The secrets of success are a good wife and a steady job. My wife told me. "

" Language cares. "

" It may be said that poems are in one way like icebergs: only about a third of their bulk appears above the surface of the page. "

" Robert Frost had always said you mustn't think of the last line first, or it's only a fake poem, not a real one. I'm inclined to agree. "

" I've never read a political poem that's accomplished anything. Poetry makes things happen, but rarely what the poet wants. "

" When modern writers gave up telling stories, they gave up the greatest thing we had. "

" Mostly the thought and the verse come inseparably. In my poem Poetics, it's as close as I come to telling how I do it. "

" Once in awhile you have a thought, and you rhyme it. "

" Obvious enough that generalities work to protect the mind from the great outdoors; is it possible that this was in fact their first purpose? "

" I sometimes talk about the making of a poem within the poem. "

" A chronicle is very different from history proper. "

" I do insist on making what I hope is sense so there's always a coherent narrative or argument that the reader can follow. "