15 Robert Frost Quotes on Creativity

Robert Frost quotes on creativity

11. A poem...begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness. It is a reaching-out toward expression; an effort to find fulfillment. A complete poem is one where an emotion finds the thought and the thought finds the words.

32. That day she put our heads together, Fate had her imagination about her, Your head so much concerned with outer, Mine with inner, weather.

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

41. When I see young men doing so wonderfully well in athletics, I don't feel angry at them. I feel jealous of them. I wish that some of my boys in writing would do the same thing.... You must have form - performance. The thing itself is indescribable, but it is felt like athletic form. To have form, feel form in sports - and by analogy feel form in verse. One works and waits for form in both. As I said, the person who spends his time criticizing the play around him will never write poetry. He will write criticism.

49. And were an epitaph to be my story I'd have a short one ready for my own. I would have written of me on my stone: I had a lover's quarrel with the world.

55. A poet never takes notes. You never take notes in a love affair.

60. It takes all sorts of in and outdoor schooling To get adapted to my kind of fooling.

78. Something inspires the only cow of late To make no more of a wall than an open gate, And think no more of wall-builders than fools.

81. Nobody was ever meant To remember or invent What he did with every cent.

109. Scholars and artists thrown together are often annoyed at the puzzle of where they differ. Both work from knowledge; but I suspect they differ most importantly in the way their knowledge is come by. Scholars get theirs with conscientious thoroughness along projected lines of logic; poets theirs cavalierly and as it happens in and out of books. They stick to nothing deliberately, but let what will stick to them like burrs where they walk in the fields.

117. It is only a moment here and a moment there that the greatest writer has.

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

131. An idea is a feat of association.

134. Do not follow where the path may lead... Go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.

149. [Style is] that which indicates how the writer takes himself and what he is saying. It is the mind skating circles around itself as it moves forward.