Robert Frost Quotes

I do not go in search of poetry. I wait for poetry to visit me.

I never think about poetry except when I'm writing it. I mean my poetry.

I feel like I am in the service of the poem. The poem isn't something I make. The poem is something I serve.

What I try to do is to go into a poem - and one writes them, of course, poem by poem - to go into each poem, first of all without having any sense whatsoever of where it's going to end up.

I don't know what I'm going to write when I begin to write. It feels like you are walking down a path, but you can't see around the bend and you don't know where you are going to go, which is fun.

I never know what I'm going to put on the canvas. The canvas paints itself. I'm just the middleman.

I was never a 'sit down with a notepad and write lyrics' kind of person.

I make a discovery in a poem as I write it.

I paint according to the moment and the theme. I don't have any prejudice. Life concerns me.

The songs sort of come out spontaneously and it'll take me awhile to figure out what exactly is happening lyrically, what kind of story I'm telling. Then I start building little bridges - word bridges - to make everything go from one point to the next point to the next point until it reaches the end.

I don't look on poetry as closed works. I feel they're going on all the time in my head and I occasionally snip off a length.

We don't know what we're writing until it just comes out. We don't sit around crunching numbers.

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.

I'm a bit of a magpie: whatever I see or hear or read feeds into the songs.

Mr. Fantasy was the only song that was scribbling on a piece of paper.

Sometimes, I knew generally what I was going to do, but I've never written anything down. Call it a sixth sense: the lines just come.

When I'm writing, I'm never trying to teach anything - maybe I'm trying to illuminate.

I'm trying to escape the shackles of a pen and a pad. I've sat in sessions with Jay-Z where he doesn't write anything down. He'll come up with the most incredible triple entendre, all in his head - it's amazing.

Beginning a poem, the poet as a rule doesn't know the way it's going to come out, and at times, he is very surprised by the way it turns out, since often it turns out better than he expected; often his thought carries further than he reckoned.

I know the sag of the unfinished poem. And I know the release of the poem that is finished.

The writing of You've Got a Friend was one of the most incredible experiences because it was mostly inspiration. It just came to me almost as we hear it.

Stop this agony of wishing Play it out Don't think, don't hesitate Curving back within yourself Just create... Just create

At the time I begin writing a novel, the last thing I want to do is follow a plot outline. To know too much at the start takes the pleasure out of discovering what the book is about.

When we are writing, or painting, or composing, we are, during the time of creativity, freed from normal restrictions, and are opened to a wider world, where colors are brighter, sounds clearer, and people more wondrously complex than we normally realize.

There is something else to be said about this immediate, spontaneous way of working, and that is this: in such moments, one is playing at the game of creation.