Robert Hass Quotes About Writing

Quotes about: Writing

• It's hell writing and it's hell not writing. The only tolerable state is having just written.

  Robert Hass

  Writing, Poetry, Hell

• Take the time to write. You can do your life's work in half an hour a day.

  Robert Hass

  Writing, Half, Hours

• Pound described poetry as original research in language, and just as formal experiment in poetry has to try things and has to go too far, so does experiment with writing about politics in poetry and what the politics of poetry is.

  Robert Hass

  Writing, Trying, Doe

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• Writing is an incessant process of discovery.

  Robert Hass

  Writing, Discovery, Incessant

  "'What Light Can Do: Essays on Art, Imagination, and the Natural World,' by Robert Hass". Interview with Jeff Glor, www.cbsnews.com. August 21, 2012.

• I think that were I in the middle of an obsession to write about, say, sudden oak death in California or my grandchildren or time and memory and how they look when you get to be in your sixties, and I thought, "Well, yes but people are dying every day in Baghdad," I wouldn't feel guilty about not writing about Baghdad if I didn't have any good ideas about how to write about it.

  Robert Hass

  Memories, Writing, Grandchildren

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• As I started reading about it, I saw that at the beginning of the 19th century, outside of New England - which was an unusually literate place - practically no one could read or write. And even in New England, the overall rate was only about 60 percent. That still means four out of 10 people couldn't put their name to a will.

  Robert Hass

  Reading, Mean, Writing

  Interview with Sarah Pollock, www.motherjones.com. March/April, 1997.

• Sometimes you have to be less ashamed about writing a bad poem than you would be about being silent.

  Robert Hass

  Writing, Would Be, Sometimes

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• A movement got started for common schools, and by the end of the 19th century, 91 percent of Americans could read and write.

  Robert Hass

  School, Writing, Movement

  Interview with Sarah Pollock, www.motherjones.com. March/April, 1997.

• Another problem about writing about politics in the "age of globalization" is that so much of the violence in the form of war and also in the forms of institutional violence - sweatshops, child labor, victimization of people economically - happens elsewhere and out of sight. And when we do know about it and need to witness it, it's always mediated by images of one kind or another, so you're kind of stuck trying to write about what it's like trying to be you living your life thinking about and experiencing this stuff in that way.

  Robert Hass

  Children, War, Writing

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• Fiction writers have their own world, and poets have their own world, and literary criticism has sort of passed over into cultural studies in the university, and so on. They seem more disconnected from each other than they did when I first began to write.

  Robert Hass

  Writing, Criticism, Fiction

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• One way to escape the universe in which everything is a kind of media cartoon is to write about the part of your life that doesn't feel like a cartoon, and how the cartoon comes into it.

  Robert Hass

  Writing, Media, Cartoon

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• When I applied to Stanford, I applied for graduate work in the PhD program, not to the creative writing program, mostly because though I had some vague ambition of becoming a writer and I was trying to write poems and essays and stories, I didn't feel like I was far enough along to submit work to some place and have it judged.

  Robert Hass

  Writing, Ambition, Creative

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• The professionalization of poetry, or the balkanization, has come out of the fact that when you apply to most creative writing programs, you have to choose your genre.

  Robert Hass

  Writing, Creative, Facts

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• When I began writing poems, it was in the late 60s and early 70s when the literary and cultural atmosphere was very much affected by what was going on in the world, which was, in succession, the civil rights movement, the antiwar movement, and the women's movement in the 60s, 70s, and into the early 80s. And all of those things affected me and affected my thinking, particularly the Vietnam War.

  Robert Hass

  War, Writing, Thinking

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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