Robert Morgan Quotes (79 Quotes)


    Distance not only gives nostalgia, but perspective, and maybe objectivity.

    I love chapbooks. They're in some ways the ideal form in which to publish and read poems. You can read 19 poems in a way you can't sit down and read 60 to 70 pages of poems.

    I don't know about the rest of the folks, but I won't be ready for a golf tournament in 30 days.

    What actually makes poetry poetry is of course impossible to define. We recognize it when we hear it, when we see it, but we can't define it.

    Southern poets are still writing narrative poems, poems in forms, dramatic poems.


    There's a lot to be said for creating a favorable work culture when you're competing against the security of a larger corporation.

    I have taught students from the New York City area so long I have a special affinity and rapport with them. It surprises me sometimes that there are students from anywhere else.

    It's one of the ways employees deal with work-life balance issues.

    Maybe the example of Southern fiction writing has been so powerful that Southern poets have sort of keyed themselves to that.

    I considered going to film school; I took a course in film and was very interested in filmmaking as well as film writing.

    The Language Poets are writing only about language itself. The Ashbery poets are writing only about poetry itself. That seems to me a kind of dead end.

    Part of the pleasure of being a writer is that you get to go to unexpected places. If a place sounds interesting, I like to go.

    We felt like we had to buy some time. I sure am glad I'm not playing this week. The course is ready, it's in good shape. It's just the whole mental attitude of people. We are just so inundated. Everybody is tired and overworked. I just don't think, psychologically, the people in this area are ready to support a golf tournament. And buying the extra 30 days is going to make all the difference in the world.

    A poem in form still has to have voice, gesture, a sense of discovery, a metaphoric connection, as any poetry does.

    The decision to write in prose instead of poetry is made more by the readers than by writers. Almost no one is interested in reading narrative in verse.

    When I read Baudelaire and Rimbaud and Nerval, I saw that was the gold standard. And I still think that.

    I love to compare different time frames. Poetry can evoke the time of the subject. By a very careful choice of words you can evoke an era, completely throw the poem into a different time scale.

    We would like to put people's minds at ease as to whether the petroleum business is responding to circumstances that are beyond its control, or if there is an element of greed in the recent price increases,

    Jim, you told me years ago you had sexual feelings for them,

    Our most famous writers are Faulkner and Eudora Welty and Flannery O'Connor. It would make sense that the poetry would reflect some of those same values, some of the same techniques.

    The idea of avant-garde art is a very suspicious thing to me, the idea that poetry is new and it keeps being new the way Chevrolets every year are new.

    We made some tough decisions and now we need to stick to them and hope for better times. We cant let emotions get in the way of decisions.

    Breakfast, lunch and dinner every day. It seems like the better we feed them, the more creative they are.

    I seem to keep returning to my father in poems because his personality was so extreme, so driven. He did everything to excess.

    Some people want to call me an Appalachian writer, even though I know some people use regional labels to belittle.

    In the later books I am much more at home in the use of language to describe things. I had never thought of that until a critic pointed that out.

    I like to just walk the ground of place I'm writing about.

    Some people swear by writing courses, but whether it really helps American poetry, I have doubts.

    When we examined budget issues last year, we realized if we kept going the way we were going, we would have to increase taxes 28 percent over four years and we had to look at ways to compromise.

    I don't think poetry is something that can be taught. We can encourage young writers, but what you can't teach them is the very essence of poetry.

    Alchemy is the art of far and near, and I think poetry is alchemy in that way. It's delightful to distort size, to see something that's tiny as though it were vast.

    We came up. We thought we'd be here about nine months. Things just clicked. The timing was good.

    I write as a way of keeping myself going. You build your life around writing, and it's what gets you through. So it's partly just curiosity to see what you can do.

    Among the American contemporaries I read with most enjoyment are several North Carolinians. I think the best poetry being written these days is being written by Southerners.

    One of the biggest changes that ever occurred in my life was going from the isolation of working part-time as a house painter in Henderson County, to Cornell, where everybody was a literary person.

    One of the most powerful devices of poetry is the use of distortions. You can go from talking about the way a minute passes to the way a century passes, or a lifetime.

    We have a lot of long narrative poems written in the 20th century, but they're not very well known, and they're not read by very many people.

    You have to really dive deep back into yourself and get rid of so much modern analytical categorization. It's one of the great things poetry does.

    Neither of my parents has been very sensitive about my writing.

    Historically, when the Fed has paused, that has generally been a good time for stocks. We're reasonably bullish on stocks.

    It makes you feel like you are accomplishing something. But you really can't take it for granted. You have to keep going. It doesn't mean anything to be No. 1 in the middle of the season.

    Part of what we love about poetry is the fact that it seems ancient, that it has an authority of ancient language and ancient form, and that it's timeless, that it reaches back.

    Young writers only take off when they find their subjects. Since almost everyone has a family and stories about family, that is often a place to start.

    One of the most powerful devices is to distort time, to go from human time to atomic time, geologic time. Sometimes you can actually accomplish that, with one unexpected word choice.


    Most people think they are underpaid. Everybody wants to get more.

    The great watershed of modern poetry is French, more than English.

    I learned to impersonate the kind of person that talks about poetry. It comes from teaching, I think.

    All, however, is not bleak, ... For many years it was thought that early-stage ovarian cancer did not give symptoms. Several papers published in the past four to five years, however, have shown that 90 percent of women with early-stage ovarian cancer do have symptoms.

    The best books of our times have included the three mature volumes of Philip Larkin. They're very short books of poems, and very carefully arranged.


    More Robert Morgan Quotations (Based on Topics)


    Literature - Poetry - Place - Idea - Time - People - Education - Pleasure - Language - Poets - Writing - Creativity & Innovation - Youth - Teaching - Discovery & Invention - Characters - World - Past - Life - View All Robert Morgan Quotations

    Related Authors


    Walter Reed - Robert Jenkins - Quintus Tullius Cicero - Norman Schwarzkopf - Lord Mountbatten - Lord Edward Cecil - Lord Amherst - Horatio Nelson - Chiang Kai-shek - Chester W. Nimitz


Page 1 of 2 1 2

Authors (by First Name)

A - B - C - D - E - F - G - H - I - J - K - L - M
N - O - P - Q - R - S - T - U - V - W - X - Y - Z

Other Inspiring Sections