Robert Hass Quotes

I thought that if one wanted to be a writer, one had to write novels because I didn't know that one could be a poet.

Fiction and poetry are my first loves, but the really beautiful lyrical essay can do so much that other forms cannot.

Prose is like this big block - you write big paragraphs. I feel that when I'm reading and writing, that a prose book is kind of monolithic. But a song is more like a feather or something.

Nonfiction is easy and fiction is hard.

A poem (surely someone has said this before) is a one-night stand, a short story a love affair, and a novel a marriage.

For me, prose walks, poetry dances.

If you like the precision and concision of poetry, a page of prose is unsatisfying in a certain way. And poetry is so direct.

Novelists and poets have existed side by side forever.

In Bosnian, there's no distinction in literature between fiction and nonfiction; there's no word describing that.

The main problem with writing in verse is, if your fourth line doesn't come out right, you've got to throw four lines away and figure out a whole new way to attack the problem. So the mortality rate is terrific.

I've read some of your modern free verse and wonder who set it free.

Poetry and prose are of equal importance to me as a reader, and there doesn't seem to be much difference in my own writing.

The object of poetic activity is essentially language: whatever his beliefs and convictions, the poet is more concerned with words than with what these words designate.

I've always thought my poems told stories.

Both types of books - fiction and nonfiction - are a search for story. As a writer and a reader, there's nothing I crave more than a good story!

It should here be added that poetry habitually takes the form of verse.

Poetry has done enough when it charms, but prose must also convince.

Sylvia Plath, Rumi, there's a lot of spoken word poets who do a really incredible job putting their spoken work into page poetry - that's what I strive to do.

I truly believe that writing is a continuum - so the different genres and forms are simply stops along the same continuum. Different ideas that need to be expressed sometimes require different forms for the ideas to float better. I don't write essays as often as I should.

I used to write sonnets and various things, and moved from there into writing prose, which, incidentally, is a lot more interesting than poetry, including the rhythms of prose.

I think everything should be in verse. 'The New York Times' should be in verse.

People think of poetry as a school subject... Poetry is very frustrating to students because they don't have a taste for ambiguity, for one thing. That gives them a poetry hangover.

I wish our clever young poets would remember my homely definitions of prose and poetry; that is, prose = words in their best order; - poetry = the best words in the best order.

There was a period in my life when I was very young that I wrote a sonnet a day just to learn concision in writing.

I was taught Shakespeare brilliantly by an eccentric genius at Harrow named Jeremy Lemmon who made me want to be a writer.