Robert Frost Writing Quotations

A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness.

I have never started a poem yet whose end I knew. Writing a poem is discovering.

Modern poets talk against business, poor things, but all of us write for money. Beginners are subjected to trial by market.

The ear is the only true writer and the only true reader.

Poetry is a way of taking life by the throat.

Talking is a hydrant in the yard and writing is a faucet upstairs in the house. Opening the first takes the pressure off the second.

Writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down.

No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.

You're always believing ahead of your evidence. What was the evidence I could write a poem? I just believed it. The most creative thing in us is to believe in a thing.

All the fun is in how you say a thing.

Writing a poem is discovering.

Like a piece of ice on a hot stove the poem must ride on its own melting.

A poem begins with a lump in the throat

Nothing flatters me more than to have it assumed that I could write prose, unless it be to have it assumed that I once pitched a baseball with distinction.

In heaven we are all ghostwriters, if we write at all.

How are we to write The Russian novel in America As long as life goes so unterribly?

I write to find out what I didn't know I knew.

I've given offense by saying I'd as soon write free verse as play tennis with the net down.

It is absurd to think that the only way to tell if a poem is lasting is to wait and see if it lasts. The right reader of a good poem can tell the moment it strikes him that he has taken an immortal wound-that he will never get over it.

All there is to writing is having ideas. To learn to write is to learn to have ideas.

Style is less the man than the way a man takes himself.

I have just been to a city in the West, a city full of poets, a city they have made safe for poets. The whole city is so lovely that you do not have to write it up to make it poetry; it is ready-made for you. But, I don't know - the poetry written in that city might not seem like poetry if read outside of the city. It would be like the jokes made when you were drunk; you have to get drunk again to appreciate them.

Never discuss the poem you contemplate writing. It's like turning on the outside spigot. It takes all the pressure off the upstairs bathroom.

I was under twenty when I deliberately put it to myself one night after good conversation that there are moments when we actually touch in talk what the best writing can only come near. The curse of our book language is not so much that it keeps forever to the same set phrases . . . but that it sounds forever with the same reading tones. We must go out into the vernacular for tones that haven't been brought to book.

Poets need not go to Niagara to write about the force of falling water.

Nearly everybody is looking for something brave to do. I don't know why people shouldn't write poetry. That's brave.

For me the initial delight is in the surprise of remembering something I didn't know I knew. I have never started a poem yet whose end I knew. Writing ... is discovering.