Robert Pinsky Quotes

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

When I had no roof I made audacity my roof.

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

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.

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

The heart grows brutal feeding on fantasies.

There is something cathartic about having absolute loss articulated.

In jazz, as in poetry, there is always that play between what’s regular and what’s wild. That has always appealed to me.

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

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

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.

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.

Poetic language is singularly appropriate for recounting the life of the king who is traditionally accepted as the author of the poetic psalms, some of which are included in the narrative.

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

To talk about the reality of life here and the work that you do here at the university.

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.

For Aliki Barnstone, poetry seems a natural medium. The vision and cadences of these poems suggest a sensibility for which poetry is as inevitable as breathing or eating.

Even in the scorched and frozen world of the dead after the holocaust The wheel as it turns goes on accreting ornaments.

Autobiography is a genre notorious for falsehood.

Poetry is the most bodily of the arts.

I think art is not an ornament or refinement at the fringes of human intelligence, I think it's at the center. It's at the core.

I delight sometimes in saying to - as when I'm a teacher, I love saying, 'This is really important, so don't write it down.' To me, what you retain is a very important filter.

This is one of the great human mysteries: why do works of art about bad things such as loss and deprivation make us feel good?