In love as in sport, the amateur status must be strictly maintained.
ROBERT GRAVESI 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.
More Robert Graves Quotes
-
-
Hate is a fear, and fear is rot That cankers root and fruit alike, Fight cleanly then, hate not, fear not, Strike with no madness when you strike.
ROBERT GRAVES -
A perfect poem is impossible. Once it had been written, the world would end. Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.
ROBERT GRAVES -
I was last in Rome in AD 540 when it was full of Goths and their heavy horses. It has changed a great deal since then.
ROBERT GRAVES -
If I thought that any poem of mine could have been written by anyone else, either a contemporary or a forerunner, I should suppress it with a blush; and I should do the same if I ever found I were imitating myself. Every poem should be new, unexpected, inimitable, and incapable of being parodied.
ROBERT GRAVES -
The gift of independence once granted cannot be lightly taken away again.
ROBERT GRAVES -
The award of a pure gold medal for poetry would flatter the recipient unduly: no poem ever attains such carat purity.
ROBERT GRAVES -
But give thanks, at least, that you still have Frost’s poems; and when you feel the need of solitude, retreat to the companionship of moon, water, hills and trees. Retreat, he reminds us, should not be confused with escape. And take these poems along for good luck!
ROBERT GRAVES -
Faults in English prose derive not so much from lack of knowledge, intelligence or art as from lack of thought, patience or goodwill.
ROBERT GRAVES -
The decline of true taste for food is the beginning of a decline in a national culture as a whole. When people have lost their authentic personal taste, they lose their personality and become the instruments of other people’s wills.
ROBERT GRAVES -
Love at first sight’some say misnaming Discovery of twinned helplessness Against the huge tug of procreation. But friendship at first sight? This also Catches fiercely at the surprised heart So that the cheek blanches then blushes.
ROBERT GRAVES -
There’s a cool web of language winds us in, Retreat from too much joy or too much fear: We grow sea-green at last and coldly die In brininess and volubility.
ROBERT GRAVES -
Fact is not truth, but a poet who wilfully defies fact cannot achieve truth.
ROBERT GRAVES -
The butterfly, a cabbage-white, (His honest idiocy of flight) Will never now, it is too late, Master the art of flying straight.
ROBERT GRAVES -
Prose books are the show dogs I breed and sell to support my cat.
ROBERT GRAVES -
For I now realize that what overcame me that evening was a sudden awareness of the power of intuition, the supra-logic that cuts out all routine processes of thought and leaps straight from problem to answer.
ROBERT GRAVES