Robert Creeley Quotes

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.

What has happened makes the world. Live on the edge, looking.

Writing is the same as music. It’s in how you phrase it, how you hold back the note, bend it, shape it, then release it. And what you don’t play is as important as what you do say.

Communication is mutual feeling with someone, not a didactic process of information.

I know this body is impatient. I know I constitute only a meager voice and mind. Yet I loved, I love. I want no sentimentality. I want no more than home.

What a great thing! To be a writer! Words are something you can carry in your head. You can really 'travel light.'

Form is never more than an extension of content.

I heard words and words full of holes aching.

Locale is both a geographic term and the inner sense of being.

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

O love, where are you leading me now?

I don’t think any man writing can worry about what the act of writing costs him, even though at times he is very aware of it.

I will go to the garden. I will be a romantic. I will sell myself in hell, in heaven also I will be.

My nature is a quagmire of unresolved confessions.

For love - I would split open your head and put a candle in behind the eyes.

My wife and I lived all alone, contention was our only bone. I fought with her, she fought with me, and things went on right merrily. But now I live here by myself with hardly a damn thing on the shelf, and pass my days with little cheer since I have parted from my dear.

Hopefully, I write what I don't know.

Still, no one finally knows what a poet is supposed either to be or to do. Especially in this country, one takes on the job—because all that one does in America is considered a "job"—with no clear sense as to what is required or where one will ultimately be led. In that respect, it is as particular an instance of a "calling" as one might point to. For years I've kept in mind, "Many are called but few are chosen." Even so "called," there were no assurances that one would be answered.

I did however used to think, you know, in the woods walking, and as a kid playing in the woods, that there was a kind of immanence there — that woods, and places of that order, had a sense, a kind of presence, that you could feel; that there was something peculiarly, physically present, a feeling of place almost conscious ... like God. It evoked that.

It is hard going to the door cut so small in the wall where the vision which echoes loneliness brings a scent of wild flowers in the wood.

Oh well, I will say here, knowing each man, let you find a good wife too, and love her as hard as you can.

As I get older, I recognize that my thinking about poetry may or may not have anything actively to do with my actual work as a poet. This strikes me as no thing cynically awry but rather seems again instance of that hapless or possibly happy fact, we do not as humans seem necessarily aware of what we are physically or psychically doing at all!

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

Comes the time when it's later and onto your table the headwaiter puts the bill

The Lady has always moved to the next town and you stumble on after Her.