Quote

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

Robert Hass

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Robert Hass
Age: 83
Born: 1941
Born: March 1
Literary Critic
Poet
Teacher
Translator
University Teacher
Writer
San Francisco County
California
Robert L. Hass
Life
Hour
Hours
Half
Write
Take
Writing
Work
Time

More quotes by Robert Hass

Image
The problem with describing poets as legislators is that at that level of politics - politics as political invention - poets have no special skills and are not apt to.
Robert Hass
Image
Our history doesn't look at our own violence, the violence in our own past, and we go out and repeat it someplace else.
Robert Hass
Image
Everybody has a different idea of when those good old days were, but everyone is convinced that there was a time when literature really mattered and that it doesn't now. They also tend to believe that it really matters someplace else - in very improbable places often. Russia is someone's idea of a place where literature really counts.
Robert Hass
Image
Do poets have any insight into what's the right ratio? I doubt it, but I think that they can be awake to what the ends are.
Robert Hass
Image
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
Image
It's the same with this idea of a literate public, and also of a democracy in which people have access to and really read the best books. It turns out that even when you create this kind of environment, maybe only 10 percent of the people want to read those books.
Robert Hass
Image
What we usually find is that when people think they have a new idea or approach something for the first time, it is actually a recurrence of a line of thinking explored in the past.
Robert Hass
Image
I think that what art can do is refresh our sense of justice, wake us up to what we've taken for granted in the political realm, as in the other realms.
Robert Hass
Image
If you're imaginatively responsible to the place you live in, you understand the watershed.
Robert Hass
Image
Someone in Ireland asked me how many Republican poets there were in the U.S., and I thought maybe two. Maybe there are 10,000 poets, and maybe there are two Republicans among them.
Robert Hass
Image
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
Image
My first book was published when I was thirty-two, so I think it was basically finished when I was thirty or thirty-one. And so then you think, Well, what have you failed to do? And my answer to myself was almost everything.
Robert Hass
Image
My suspicion is that once you have literacy in place, the readership has not changed very much.
Robert Hass
Image
I thought it was irrelevant to talk about what a wonderful thing poetry was if you didn't teach people to read.
Robert Hass
Image
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
Image
Poetry is a fireplace in summer or a fan in winter.
Robert Hass
Image
I think that the job of poetry, its political job, is to refresh the idea of justice, which is going dead in us all the time.
Robert Hass
Image
If you ask me if I have this or that principle, tell me what its consequences are, and then I'll tell you whether I have that principle or not.
Robert Hass
Image
[Osip] Mandelstam was killed by Stalinist forces.
Robert Hass
Image
Where politics is concerned, I think poets have to be pragmatists, philosophical pragmatists.
Robert Hass