Art & Creativity Quote by Robert Graves

Graves is doing that very British thing: landing a career manifesto as a throwaway joke. “Show dogs” are bred for spectatorship, pedigrees, prizes - the whole public-facing economy of taste. They are trained to perform on command, to be legible as “good.” By casting his prose books in that role, he’s not merely being modest about novels; he’s hinting at the compromises of the marketplace, the way prose can be groomed into something sellable, reviewable, and safely admired.

Then comes the punchline: the cat. Cats aren’t bred to please you; they do what they like and dare you to keep up. In Graves’s private taxonomy, the cat is the real creature he’s feeding: poetry, or at least the more willful, less domesticated part of his imagination. The subtext is less “I don’t care about money” than “I know exactly which parts of my work are rentable.”

Context matters. Graves lived through the industrial-scale trauma of World War I, and his subsequent life included self-exile, mythmaking, and a steady suspicion of institutions - literary ones included. Writing, for him, wasn’t just self-expression; it was survival, psychologically and financially. The line works because it admits the dirty secret of artistic production without self-pity: the serious work often needs a hustle to subsidize it. The joke isn’t anti-prose so much as anti-pretense, a neat refusal to let commerce dictate where the soul of the project lives.