Robert Pinsky Quotes

• Poetry's medium is not merely light as air, it is air: vital and deep as ordinary breath.

  Robert Pinsky

  Light, Air, Ordinary

  47 Copy quote

• When I had no roof I made audacity my roof.

  Robert Pinsky

  Audacity, Made, Roof

  Robert Pinsky (2015). “Jersey Rain: Poems”, p.5, Macmillan

  37 Copy quote

• Deciding to remember, and what to remember, is how we decide who we are.

  Robert Pinsky

  Memories, Identity, Who We Are

  23 Copy quote

• A sentence is like a tune. A memorable sentence gives its emotion a melodic shape. You want to hear it again, say it—in a way, to hum it to yourself. You desire, if only in the sound studio of your imagination, to repeat the physical experience of that sentence. That craving, emotional and intellectual but beginning in the body with a certain gesture of sound, is near the heart of poetry.

  Robert Pinsky

  Memorable, Heart, Emotional

  28 Copy quote

• 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

  Air, Voice, Sound

  18 Copy quote

• Sometimes the ideas that mean the most to you will feel true long before you can quite formulate them or justify them.

  Robert Pinsky

  Mean, Ideas, Long

  10 Copy quote

• The heart grows brutal feeding on fantasies.

  Robert Pinsky

  Heart, Fantasy, Feeding

  12 Copy quote

• I have always been thinking about the sounds and shades and aromas of words - fitting them together or disrupting their customary march - more or less every second of my life, waking and sleeping.

  Robert Pinsky

  Sleep, Thinking, Together

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  9 Copy quote

• 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

  Strong, Children, Paper

  "Thrilling Difficulty". Interview with Gibson Fay-LeBlanc, www.guernicamag.com. November 1, 2007.

  16 Copy quote

• 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

  Play, Jazz

  11 Copy quote

• 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

  Couple, Reading, Mean

  "The Pause: An Underestimated Element in Poetry". poemsoutloud.net. April 14, 2009.

  10 Copy quote

• Poetry is the most bodily of the arts.

  Robert Pinsky

  Art, Poetry Is

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Art, Air, Dancing

  Robert Pinsky (2014). “The Sounds of Poetry: A Brief Guide”, p.8, Macmillan

  6 Copy quote

• There is something cathartic about having absolute loss articulated.

  Robert Pinsky

  Health, Loss, Cathartic

  12 Copy quote

• 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

  Reading, Voice, Differences

  4 Copy quote

• If what you want to do is make good art, decide whats good and try to imitate it.

  Robert Pinsky

  Art, Trying, Want

  "On Living Merrily and Trusting Good Verses" Robert Pinsky, bigthink.com.

  13 Copy quote

• The last thing a young artist should do in poetry or any other field is think about whats in style, whats current, what are the trends. Think instead of what you like to read, what do you admire, what you like to listen to in music. What do you like to look at in architecture? Try to make a poem that has some of those qualities.

  Robert Pinsky

  Thinking, Artist, Style

  "On Living Merrily and Trusting Good Verses" by Robert Pinsky, bigthink.com.

  4 Copy quote

• My devils and angels, fears and hopes, insights and stupidities, loves and loathings, are what they are. I don't edit them out so much as try to make them interesting - whether I am talking to you, or writing a poem, or joking with my kids, or speaking on television.

  Robert Pinsky

  Writing, Kids, Angel

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  8 Copy quote

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

  Robert Pinsky

  Art, Problem, Solve

  "On Living Merrily and Trusting Good Verses" by Robert Pinsky, bigthink.com.

  7 Copy quote

• My poems - like my family life, my life with friends, my teaching - these things express who I am. I don't feel any extra responsibilities or relishes or necessary evils in them. They are part of who I am, with all of those customary desires and doubts, purposes and confusions that come along with being a particular person.

  Robert Pinsky

  Teaching, Responsibility, Who I Am

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• Autobiography is a genre notorious for falsehood.

  Robert Pinsky

  Notorious, Genre, Autobiography

  "How My Mind Writes Poems" by Robert Pinsky, bigthink.com.

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Memorable, Brightness, Language

  Robert Pinsky (2014). “The Sounds of Poetry: A Brief Guide”, p.116, Macmillan

  8 Copy quote

• There is much appeal for me in Eastern religion, the little I know of it. And something thorny in me finds American adaptations of Buddhism terribly self-indulgent, silly, gooey in the way the English call "wet."

  Robert Pinsky

  Silly, Buddhism, Self

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

• Poetry’s medium is the individual chest and throat and mouth of whoever undertakes to say the poem.

  Robert Pinsky

  Mouths, Individual, Mediums

  9 Copy quote

• 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

  Art, Feelings, Promise

  "Poetry and the World". Book by Robert Pinsky, 1988.

  9 Copy quote

You May Also Like:

Robert Hass

W. S. Merwin

Billy Collins

Robert Frost

Louise Glück

Rita Dove

Kay Ryan

Ted Kooser