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"We learned in the university to consider Wordsworth and Keats as Romantics. They were only a generation apart, but Wordsworth didn't even read Keats's book when he gave him a copy."
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Exlpore more Writing quotes
"Writing. Is it a way to be remembered,or a need to become immortal?"
"I know nothing in the world that has as much power as a word. Sometimes I write one, and I look at it, until it begins to shine."
"Between the lines of every book the writer reveals their own secrets."
"I never know what I think about something until I read what I've written on it."
"In the middle section of the book Mirabelle breaks into not one, but two houses near Belgravia Books. I had fun scoping these out - checking which windows looked least secure and figuring out how to scale the mews houses to the rear to get her inside. A man came out at one point, 'What are you doing?' he questioned me. 'The thing is, I'm writing a book,' I started with a smile. He waved me off, his hand as wide as a tennis racket. 'Everyone is writing a book, my dear,' he said. Between you and I, it's his house that MIrabelle ends up breaking into."
"It is the most fun I'm ever going to have. I love to write. I love it. I mean, there's nothing in the world I like better, and that includes sex, probably because I'm so very bad at it. It's the greatest peace when I'm in a scene, and it's just me and the character, that's it, that's where I want to live my life."
"But in the wake of 'Bullet,' all the guys wanted to know was, 'How's it doing? How's it selling?' How to tell them I didn't give a flying fuck how it was doing in the marketplace, that what I cared about was how it was doing in the reader's heart?"
Explore more quotes by Thom Gunn
"I deliberately decided to write a kind of guide to leather bars for straight people, for people not into leather, so that people could see what it was all about."
"I was reading the poems of Rochester. Rochester made himself out to be bisexual, but I think that was only to shock. Most of his poetry is sexual, even pornographic."
"While I don't satisfy my curiosity about the way I work, I'm terribly curious about the way other poets work. But I would think that's true about many of us."
"I admired what my students were writing, but I think their improvement doesn't directly result from me but from being in a class, being with each other."
"When I was an undergraduate I had very badly annotated editions of Shakespeare's sonnets, all of which left out the important fact that will has a sexual sense in Shakespeare's sonnets."
"I was at a benefit for some imprisoned students in the '60s at San Francisco State, and there were lots of poets reading for the benefit: one was Elizabeth Bishop."
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