Robert Pinsky Quotes

You don't make a poem with ideas, but with words.

I enjoy the inventive ways in which language is manipulated to make meaning.

In effect we are, bending and breaking the rules of the language. And if someone were to ask why we do it, the answer is simply: for fun

You should write because you love the shape of stories and sentences and the creation of different words on a page. Writing comes from reading, and reading is the finest teacher of how to write.

For poets today or in any age, the choice is not between freedom on the one hand and abstruse French forms on the other. The choice is between the nullity and vanity of our first efforts, and the developing of a sense of idiom, form, structure, metre, rhythm, line - all the fundamental characteristics of this verbal art.

I love words. They're fun. I don't think any word can just be filler. There's no room for it. It's like a puzzle. Every song can be written a million times. How can you say it differently?

I can't understand these chaps who go round American universities explaining how they write poems: It's like going round explaining how you sleep with your wife.

When the poet makes his perfect selection of a word, he is endowing the word with life.

Again like Williams, with the emphasis now regrettable, when a man makes a poem, makes it mind you, he takes the words as he finds them lying interrelated about him.

The idea that a poem was a made thing stayed with me, and I decided then that I wanted to be an artist, not just a diarist. So I put myself through a kind of apprenticeship in writing poetry, and I understood even then that my practice as a poet was deeply related to my reading.

Well, I still write poetry, but I wouldn't call myself a poet.

The reason a poet is a poet is to write poems, not to advertise himself as a poet.

A poet is a professional maker of verbal objects.

I realized poetry's the thing that I can do 'cause I can stick at it and work with tremendous intensity.

A novelist can get by on story, but the poet has nothing but the words.

The importance of poetry is not measured, finally, by what the poet says but by how he says it.

It's absolutely crucial to maintain my life as a poet.

I like the way words go together and I like the gamesmanship of writing poetry. It is such a challenge.

From the throes of inspiration and the eddies of thought the poet may at last be able to arrive at, and convey the right admixture of words and meaning.

I like to think that the best poetry is or involves a contest between ordinary conversation and ritual.

Every device there is in language is there to be used, if you will. Poets have got to enjoy themselves sometimes, and the twistings and convolutions of words, the inventions and contrivances, are all part of the joy that is part of the painful, voluntary work.

My intention is to write poems. That's what I've been doing most of my life.

With poets, the choice of words is invariably more telling than the story line; that's why the best of them dread the thought of their biographies being written.

I love playing with language and the rhythm of language - for some reason, this seems so much easier for me to do when I get to make things up than when writing nonfiction.

I've written poetry most of my life.