quotes from classic

When he's bored and he has simply an idea to carry it's awful, it's mawkish and sluggish-he's drunk, you know, you can tell.

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I thought when younger that the burden of the song or the poem was the emotional condition that it made articulate or the feelings it thus gave voice to, or the this or that, whatever is-and I think all of that is part of its real fact, but paradoxically, I don't think that's what defines it.

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At least I felt a responsibility for everything that was started. It must have been that New England sense that you've got to finish what you start.

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It's the classic story form. All staying equal, or proving equal, or being equal, this will all continue, and the next time around, we'll move on to see what happened to Harry after he dove in the river, or who his friend John really was, and so on.

more quotes from Robert Creeley

Where the habit of something-what Granddad's favorite chair is-is the chair it literally is, but it's endlessly permeated, vibrating in that other, so that a place has all the echoes of what its use has been.

more quotes from Robert Creeley

And what's fascinating in The Ten Thousand Things is that although there's time, an inexorable time of the three generations of lives, actively present, but place is the time, time doesn't really have to do with simply the human experience of it.

more quotes from Robert Creeley

This novel is not that way; this narrative is of a culture which is endlessly permeated, not permissive, but endlessly permeated by its own physical reality. And it has no time that's ambitious.

more quotes from Robert Creeley

Again like Williams, with the emphasis now regrettable, when a man makes a poem, makes it mind you, he takes the words as he finds them lying interrelated about him.

more quotes from Robert Creeley

I remember once being told by an outstanding landscape architect, Dan Kiley, how he'd met his wife. He'd found himself at the edge of Lake Champlain, in the middle of the winter-very cold and desolate place-he just was absolutely captivated by this lake.

more quotes from Robert Creeley

He's dead, yeah. I was thinking of Jim Kelly now, the great Buffalo Bills quarterback, with his, not displacement, but his having been happily, successfully replaced by Frank Lloyd Reich.

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I don't know, I love the goofs in prose, I think they're beautiful. It's a newer form than poetry, it's much more opaque.

more quotes from Robert Creeley

He means the door I presume, the door you open and close as you choose or can. But again, what's so moving in Dermout's writing is the complex, echoing, confident, permeating, social experience, far more than her premises.

more quotes from Robert Creeley

The pattern of the narrative never of necessity wants to end, it never has to.

more quotes from Robert Creeley

He had, almost, tactics. He was somewhere; he had to figure his next move, always.

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No matter how wild reality was obviously often being, it was an absolutely secure place, as a tone and intelligence, and a thing happening.

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That poetry survived in its formal agencies finally, and that prose survived to get something said.

more quotes from Robert Creeley

All of which was OK, as that proved then, I certainly wouldn't contradict it as a necessary sense of things.

more quotes from Robert Creeley

There are a lot of editorials that have nothing to do with anything like that. But I was just thinking of that sense of prose as being very responsible and perceptive, thoughtful, intimate, and contriving a quote statement.

more quotes from Robert Creeley

The awful thing, as a kid reading, was that you came to the end of the story, and that was it. I mean, it would be heartbreaking that there was no more of it.

more quotes from Robert Creeley

Suddenly the whole imagination of writing and editorial and newspaper and all these presumptions about who am I reading this, and who else other people may be, and all that, it's so grimly brutal!

more quotes from Robert Creeley