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"Blake has always been a favorite, the lyrics, not so much the prophetic books, but I suppose Yeats influenced me more as a young poet, and the American, Robert Frost."
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"A man reading the Dickens novel wished that it might never end. Men read a Dickens story six times because they knew it so well."
Author Name
Personal Development

"It is only a novel... or, in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour, are conveyed to the world in the best-chosen language."
Author Name
Personal Development

"Prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated hen-house."
Author Name
Personal Development

"Every healthy person at some period must feed on fiction as well as fact; because fact is a thing which the world gives to him, whereas fiction is a thing which he gives to the world."
Author Name
Personal Development

"The role of a story was, in the broadest terms, to transpose a single problem into another form. ... It was like a piece of paper bearing the indecipherable text of a magic spell."
Author Name
Personal Development

"Witness also that when we talk about literature, we do so in the present tense. When we speak of the dead, we are not so kind."
Author Name
Personal Development

"Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman."
Author Name
Personal Development

"And she never could remember and ever since that day what Lucy means by a good story is a story which reminds her of the forgotten story in the Magician's Book."
Author Name
Personal Development

"I think the only cardinal evil on earth is that of placing your prime concern within other men. I've always demanded a certain quality in the people I liked. I've always recognized it at once-and it's the only quality I respect in men. I chose my friends by that...A self-sufficient ego. Nothing else matters."
Author Name
Personal Development

"It is usually unbearably painful to read a book by an author who knows way less than you do, unless the book is a novel."
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Personal Development
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"I did know Ted Hughes and I partly wrote the book to explain to myself and others the complexities of a marriage that was for six years wonderfully productive of poetry and then ended in tragedy."
Marriage

"I am now seventy, rather glad, really, that I won't live to see the horrors to come in the 21st century."
Now

"I write, or used to write, to explain to myself situations I couldn't otherwise solve or understand. Meditation comes very naturally to me."
Reflection

"When everything is for 'fun' nothing is for the good."
Nothing

"Poets should ignore most criticism and get on with making poetry."
Poetry

"There is far too much literary criticism of the wrong kind. That is why I never could have survived as an academic."
Criticism

"Sylvia Plath was just a month and a half older than I, and when she committed suicide I was only 30 - and very shocked and sorry. I never knew her personally."
Reflection

"Yes, I do often write poems from the mind, but I hope I don't ignore feelings and emotions."
Emotional

"Blake has always been a favorite, the lyrics, not so much the prophetic books, but I suppose Yeats influenced me more as a young poet, and the American, Robert Frost."
Literature

"I don't like poetry that just slaps violent words on a canvas, as it were."
Poetry
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