I delight sometimes in saying to - as when I'm a teacher, I love saying, 'This is really important, so don't write it down.' To me, what you retain is a very important filter.

- Robert Pinsky

I think art is not an ornament or refinement at the fringes of human intelligence, I think it's at the center. It's at the core.

- Robert Pinsky

I think my first experience of art, or the joy in making art, was playing the horn at some high-school dance or bar mitzvah or wedding, looking at a roomful of people moving their bodies around in time to what I was doing. There was a piano player, a bass player, a drummer, and my breath making the melody.

- Robert Pinsky

Jazz and poetry both involve a structure that may be familiar and to some extent predictable. And then, you try to create as much surprise and spontaneity and feeling and variation while respecting that structure.

- Robert Pinsky

The last thing a young artist should do in poetry or any other field is think about what's in style, what's current, what are the trends. Think instead of what you like to read, what do you admire, what you like to listen to in music. What do you like to look at in architecture? Try to make a poem that has some of those qualities.

- Robert Pinsky

For an American, there's no automatic place where people love the art of poetry. There's not a social class that considers poetry its property the way in some countries there's a snob value to the art.

- Robert Pinsky