Fact is not truth, but a poet who wilfully defies fact cannot achieve truth.
ROBERT GRAVESNever use the word ‘audience.’ The very idea of a public, unless the poet is writing for money, seems wrong to me. Poets don’t have an ‘audience’. They’re talking to a single person all the time.
More Robert Graves Quotes
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No honest theologian therefore can deny that his acceptance of Jesus as Christ logically binds every Christian to a belief in reincarnation – in Elias case (who was later John the Baptist) at least.
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Nine-tenths of English poetic literature is the result either of vulgar careerism or of a poet trying to keep his hand in. Most poets are dead by their late twenties.
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I revise the manuscript till I can’t read it any longer, then I get somebody to type it. Then I revise the typing. Then it’s retyped again. Then there’s a third typing, which is the final one. Nothing should then remain that offends the eye.
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One gets to the heart of the matter by a series of experiences in the same pattern, but in different colors.
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He found a formula for drawing comic rabbits: This formula for drawing comic rabbits paid. Till in the end he could not change the tragic habits This formula for drawing comic rabbits made.
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You mean that people who continue virtuous in an old-fashioned way must inevitably suffer in times like these?
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Marriage, like money, is still with us; and, like money, progressively devalued.
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Myths are seldom simple, and never irresponsible.
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Well, we’ve been lucky devils both And there is no need for a pledge or oath To bind our lovely friendship fast, By firmer stuff Close bound enough.
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Genius not only diagnoses the situation but supplies the answers.
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Let all the poison that lurks in the mud, hatch out.
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There is no such thing as good writing, only good rewriting.
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We forget cruelty and past betrayal, Heedless of where the next bright bolt may fall.
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I made no more protests. What was the use of struggling against fate
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I made no more protests. What was the use of struggling against fate.
ROBERT GRAVES






