Quotes by Robert Pinsky

About Robert Pinsky:

Robert Pinsky is an American poet, essayist, literary critic, and translator. From 1997 to 2000, he served as Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. Pinsky is the author of nineteen books, most of which are collections of his poetry. His published work also includes critically acclaimed translations, including The Inferno of Dante Alighieri and The Separate Notebooks by Czes?aw Mi?osz. He teaches at Boston University.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

When I was a kid, there was unhappiness in my family - was dealt with partly by escaping to television. And from a very early age, for whatever reason, I became scornful and resistant to and angry about that. And some other time in my life, I realize...

Robert Pinsky

The last thing a young artist should do in poetry or any other field is think about what's in style, what's 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 lik...

Robert Pinsky

I think my first experience of art, or the joy in making art, was playing the horn at some high-school dance or bar mitzvah or wedding, looking at a roomful of people moving their bodies around in time to what I was doing. There was a piano player, a...

Robert Pinsky

Poetry is a vocal art for me - but not necessarily a performative one. It might be reading to oneself or recalling some lines by memory.

Robert Pinsky

For a lot of people, well-meaning teaching has made poetry seem arcane, difficult, a kind of brown-knotting medicine that might be good for you but doesn't taste so good. So I tried to make a collection of poetry that would be fun. And that would bri...

Robert Pinsky

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

Robert Pinsky

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

Robert Pinsky

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.

Robert Pinsky

For an American, there's no automatic place where people love the art of poetry. There's not a social class that considers poetry its property the way in some countries there's a snob value to the art.

Robert Pinsky

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, and to feel how the child and you are engaging in something that's really basic to the animal, which is passing on in t...

Robert Pinsky

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

Robert Pinsky

Autobiography is a genre notorious for falsehood.

Robert Pinsky

Method involves a slavish addiction to laws, and we can only aspire to anarchy.

Robert Pinsky

If you want to make films, you'll watch Kurosawa. If you want to play a violin, you listen to Seghetti. Same with somebody who has the ambition to play in the NBA. I watch a basketball game; I enjoy it. Somebody who really wants to learn to play is s...

Robert Pinsky

If I live near a dancer or a painter, or a clarinet player comes from my neighborhood, I take some pleasure in that, feel a little more as if I come from someplace in particular.

Robert Pinsky

'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 your mind and in your voice. So I compose while I'm driving or in the shower.

Robert Pinsky

New Jersey is the most poetic state: close enough to New York to be urban and cosmopolitan, far enough to be desirous and unsure; densely populated, but full of farms and woods, with the most deer of any state.

Robert Pinsky

I am a frustrated saxophone player. If I could, I would abandon all of my books, and I would trade it all if I could play the way people I admire play.

Robert Pinsky

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 ...

Robert Pinsky

I'm far from immune to the American, perhaps historically male, prejudice toward practical and physical competence; I hope I've also considered that prejudice enough to have some distance from it.

Robert Pinsky

Author Bio

  • NameRobert Pinsky
  • DescriptionAmerican poet, editor, literary critic, academic.
  • BornOctober 20, 1940
  • CountryUnited States Of America
  • ProfessionPoet; Author
  • AwardsGuggenheim Fellowship