If what you want to do is make good art, decide whats good and try to imitate it. — Robert Pinsky Copy Share Image
Sometimes the ideas that mean the most to you will feel true long before you can quite formulate them or justify them. — Robert Pinsky Copy Share Image
Art will not solve your problems. It will not enable you to live merrily. — Robert Pinsky Copy Share Image
When I was a teenager, just about the only thing I could do right was play music. In my graduating class, I… — Robert Pinsky Copy Share Image
I delight sometimes in saying to - as when I'm a teacher, I love saying, 'This is really important, so don't write… — Robert Pinsky Copy Share Image
Jazz and poetry both involve a structure that may be familiar and to some extent predictable. And then, you try to create… — Robert Pinsky Copy Share Image
'Write' is almost the wrong verb for what I do. I think 'compose' is more accurate because you're trying to make the… — Robert Pinsky Copy Share Image
The last thing a young artist should do in poetry or any other field is think about whats in style, whats current,… — Robert Pinsky Copy Share Image
All questions of process require an answer that begins with a very important sentence, and the sentence is: 'Everybody is different.' Whatever… — Robert Pinsky Copy Share Image
To me, writing is a matter of voice. I think like that. The expression I sometimes use to myself is 'actual song.'… — Robert Pinsky Copy Share Image
For a lot of people, well-meaning teaching has made poetry seem arcane, difficult, a kind of brown-knotting medicine that might be good… — Robert Pinsky Copy Share Image
The best argument for teaching poetry is to put a three-year-old or a four-year-old and read Dr. Seuss, or Robert Louis Stevenson,… — Robert Pinsky Copy Share Image
If you want to make films, you'll watch Kurosawa. If you want to play a violin, you listen to Seghetti. Same with… — Robert Pinsky Copy Share Image
I have always been thinking about the sounds and shades and aromas of words - fitting them together or disrupting their customary march -… — Robert Pinsky Copy Share
I am a frustrated saxophone player. If I could, I would abandon all of my books, and I would trade it all if I… — Robert Pinsky Copy Share
When I was a teenager, just about the only thing I could do right was play music. In my graduating class, I was certainly… — Robert Pinsky Copy Share
Poetry’s medium is the individual chest and throat and mouth of whoever undertakes to say the poem. — Robert Pinsky Copy Share
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 Copy Share
“This is one of the great human mysteries: why do works of art about bad things such as loss and deprivation make us feel… — Robert Pinsky Copy Share
Even in the scorched and frozen world of the dead after the holocaust The wheel as it turns goes on accreting ornaments. — Robert Pinsky Copy Share
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 Copy Share
The last thing a young artist should do in poetry or any other field is think about whats in style, whats current, what are… — Robert Pinsky Copy Share
The wonderful 17th Century poet, Robert Herrick, wrote a poem entitled, 'To Live Merrily and to Trust to Good Verses.' Easy to say, Robert… — Robert Pinsky Copy Share
'Write' is almost the wrong verb for what I do. I think 'compose' is more accurate because you're trying to make the sounds in… — Robert Pinsky Copy Share
My poems - like my family life, my life with friends, my teaching - these things express who I am. I don't feel any… — Robert Pinsky Copy Share
“Symmetry suggests one myth, or significance: the drinking of writers coming from too much concentration, in solitude, upon feelings expressed for or even about… — Robert Pinsky Copy Share
I love form, but I'm not interested in forms. I've never written a sonnet or villanelle or sestina or any of that. For me,… — Robert Pinsky Copy Share
