Robert Graves

“To be a poet is a condition rather than a profession.”

“Prose books are the show dogs I breed and sell to support my cat.”

“England looked strange to us returned soldiers. We could not understand the war-madness that ran wild everywhere, looking for a pseudo-military outlet. The civilians talked a foreign language. I found serious conversation with my parents all but impossible.”

“Fact is not truth, but a poet who willfully defies fact cannot achieve truth.”

“I have done many impious things--no great ruler can do otherwise. I have put the good of the Empire before all human considerations. To keep the Empire free from factions I have had to commit many crimes.”

“Genius not only diagnoses the situation but supplies the answers.”

“Never use the word 'audience.' The very idea of a public, unless the poet is writing for money, seems wrong to me. Poets don't have an 'audience'. They're talking to a single person all the time.”

“When the immense drugged universe explodesIn a cascade of unendurable colourAnd leaves us gasping naked,This is no more than the ectasy of chaos:Hold fast, with both hands, to that royal loveWhich alone, as we know certainly, restoresFragmentation into true being.Ecstasy of Chaos”

“The remarkable thing about Shakespeare is that he really is very good, in spite of all the people who say he is very good.”

“If I were a girl, I'd despair. The supply of good women far exceeds that of the men who deserve them.”

“But that so many scholars are barbarians does not much matter so long as a few of them are ready to help with their specialized knowledge the few independent thinkers, that is to say the poets, who try to to keep civilization alive.”

“About this business of being a gentleman: I paid so heavily for the fourteen years of my gentleman’s education that I feel entitled, now and then, to get some sort of return.”

“If there's no money in poetry, neither is there poetry in money.”

“Anthropologists are a connecting link between poets and scientists; though their field-work among primitive peoples has often made them forget the language of science.”

“To resist the social pressure now put even on one's leisure time, requires a tougher upbringing and a more obstinate willfulness about going one's own way, than ever before.”

“There’s no money in poetry, but there’s no poetry in money, either”

“I was thinking, "So, I’m Emperor, am I? What nonsense! But at least I'll be able to make people read my books now.”

“What we now call 'finance' is, I hold, an intellectual perversion of what began as warm human love.”

“There is no money in poetry, but then there is no poetry in money.”

“A remarkable thing about Shakespeare is that he is really very good in spite of all the people who say he is very good.”