Robert Graves Quotes

There should be two main objectives in ordinary prose writing: to convey a message and to include in it nothing that will distract the reader's attention or check his habitual pace of reading - he should feel that he is seated at ease in a taxi not riding a temperamental horse through traffic.

I don't really feel my poems are mine at all. I didn't create them out of nothing. I owe them to my relations with other people.

There's no money in poetry but then there's no poetry in money either.

A perfect poem is impossible. Once it has been written the world would end.

You don't want captains in the army who know too much or think too much.

Poets can't march in protest or do that sort of thing. I feel that's against the rules, and pointless. If mankind wants a great big final bang, that's what it'll get. One should never protest against anything unless it's going to have an effect. None of those marches do. One should either be silent or go straight to the top.

This seems to me a philosophical question, and therefore irrelevant, question. A poet's destiny is to love.

To know only one thing well is to have a barbaric mind: civilization implies the graceful relation of all varieties of experience to a central human system of thought.