Robert Lowell Quotes

He lives with his creativity in high gear.

I like rhyme because it is memorable, I like form because having to work to a pattern gives me original ideas.

The creative act amazes me. Whether it's poetry, whether it's music, it's an amazing process, and it has something to do with bringing forth the old out into the world to create and to bring forth that which will rejuvenate.

A poet is someone who stands outside in the rain hoping to be struck by lightning.

If you know what you are going to write when you're writing a poem, it's going to be average.

No one was creating and I always wanted to be created on.

All the things we have to remember, and I've mentioned this before, is that we're all artists.

Conception, my boy, fundamental brain work, is what makes all the difference in art.

If you are a creative person, you try to create things that are an extension of yourself.

After I'd produced about two dozen pen and ink drawings, one evening I decided that they needed poems to accompany them. I still have no idea where that notion came from, but it took me about two hours to produce verses for these creatures.

If I don't have a model in front of me, I don't have an idea.

The imagination imitates. It is the critical spirit that creates.

I'm not like a professional writer with professional skills. Songs kind of come into my head the same way they did when I was a kid. I say I'm an overgrown kindergarten kid. I work on songs.

A writer is an artist. They're creating things out of thin air.

I have such deep appreciation for artists who have the ability to create something from within, something completely unique and original to each piece of work.

Sometimes I think of creativity or art as this well that we all draw from.

Jean Renoir once suggested that most true creators have only one idea and spend their lives reworking it, but then very rapidly he added that most people don't have any ideas at all, so one idea is pretty amazing.

When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn't really do it, they just saw something.

Creativity is contagious. And so is banality. Criticism is an art in itself. Don't let the dullness around destroy the creativity within. T.S. Eliot said, "honest criticism and sensitive appreciation is directed not upon the poet but upon the poetry." Good to remember.

People frequently believe the creative life is grounded in fantasy. The more difficult truth is that creativity is grounded in reality, in the particular, the focused, the well observed or specifically imagined.

Imagination is the beginning of creation.

The void yields up nothing. You have to be a great poet to make it ring.

An artist must have imagination. An artist who does not use his imagination is a mechanic.

To be an artist, you have to nurture the things that most people discard.