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There is no such thing as good writing, only good rewriting.

Robert Graves

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Robert Graves
Age: 90 †
Born: 1895
Born: July 24
Died: 1985
Died: December 7
Literary Critic
Military Personnel
Mythographer
Novelist
Playwright
Poet
Science Fiction Writer
Screenwriter
Theatre Critic
Translator
Robert von Ranke-Graves
Robert Von Ranke-Graves
Robert Ranke Graves
Robert von Ranke Graves
Rewriting
Writing
Thing
Good

More quotes by Robert Graves

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The butterfly, a cabbage-white, (His honest idiocy of flight) Will never now, it is too late, Master the art of flying straight.
Robert Graves
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There's a cool web of language winds us in, Retreat from too much joy or too much fear: We grow sea-green at last and coldly die In brininess and volubility.
Robert Graves
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To be a poet is a condition rather than a profession.
Robert Graves
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As you are woman, so be lovely: As you are lovely, so be various, Merciful as constant, constant as various, So be mine, as I yours for ever.
Robert Graves
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When I'm killed, don't think of me Buried there in Cambrin Wood, Nor as in Zion think of me With the Intolerable Good. And there's one thing that I know well, I'm damned if I'll be damned to Hell!
Robert Graves
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Truth-loving Persians do not dwell upon The trivial skirmish fought near Marathon.
Robert Graves
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What we now call finance is, I hold, an intellectual perversion of what began as warm human love.
Robert Graves
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Patriotism, in the trenches, was too remote a sentiment, and at once rejected as fit only for civilians, or prisoners. A new arrival who talked patriotism would soon be told to cut it out.
Robert Graves
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Any honest housewife would sort them out,/ Having a nose for fish, an eye for apples.
Robert Graves
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Genius not only diagnoses the situation but supplies the answers.
Robert Graves
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Entrance and exit wounds are silvered clean, The track aches only when the rain reminds. The one-legged man forgets his leg of wood, The one-armed man his jointed wooden arm. The blinded man sees with his ears and hands As much or more than once with both his eyes.
Robert Graves
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The art of poetry consists in taking the poem through draft after draft, without losing its inspirational magic: he removes everything irrelevant or distracting, and tightens up what is left. Lazy poets never carry their early drafts far enough: some even believe that virtue lies in the original doodle scrawled on the back of an envelope.
Robert Graves
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Fact is not truth, but a poet who wilfully defies fact cannot achieve truth.
Robert Graves
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Before an attack, the platoon pools all its available cash and the survivors divide it up afterwards. Those who are killed can't complain, the wounded would have given far more than that to escape as they have, and the unwounded regard the money as a consolation prize for still being here.
Robert Graves
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The function of poetry is religious invocation of the muse its use is the experience of mixed exaltation and horror that her presence excites.
Robert Graves
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Love without hope, as when the young bird-catcher Swept off his tall hat to the Squire's own daughter, So let the imprisoned larks escape and fly Singing about her head, as she rode by.
Robert Graves
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In love as in sport, the amateur status must be strictly maintained.
Robert Graves
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I don't really feel my poems are mine at all. I didn't create them out of nothing. I owe them to my relations with other people.
Robert Graves
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This seems to me a philosophical question, and therefore irrelevant, question. A poet's destiny is to love.
Robert Graves
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Take your delight in momentariness, Walk between dark and dark a shining space With the grave 's narrowness, though not its peace.
Robert Graves