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"It seems to me that readers sometimes make the genesis of a poem more mysterious than it is (by that I perhaps mean, think of it as something outside their own experience)."
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"I think that every reader on earth has a list of cherished books as unique as their fingerprints....I think that, as you age, you tend to gravitate towards the classics, but those aren't the books that give you the same sort of hope for the world that a cherished book does."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Reading, solitude, idleness, a soft and sedentary life, intercourse with women and young people, these are perilous paths for a young man, and these lead him constantly into danger."
Author Name
Personal Development
"The only important thing in a book is the meaning that it has for you."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Just as one spoils the stomach by overfeeding and thereby impairs the whole body, so can one overload and choke the mind by giving it too much nourishment. For the more one reads the fewer are the traces left of what one has read; the mind is like a tablet that has been written over and over. Hence it is impossible to reflect; and it is only by reflection that one can assimilate what one has read. If one reads straight ahead without pondering over it later, what has been read does not take root, but is for the most part lost."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Those who are incapable of committing great crimes do not readily suspect them in others."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Whatever you're ready for is ready for you."
Author Name
Personal Development
"A book is as dangerous as any journey you might take. The person who closes the back cover may not be the same one that opened the front one. Treat them with respect."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Back at the Chateau Windsor there was a rat-like scratching at the door of my room. Vinod, the youngest servant, came in with a soda water. He placed it next to the bag of toffees. Then he watched me read. I was used to being observed reading. Sometimes the room would fill like a railway station at rush hour and I would be expected to cure widespread boredom."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Someday I must read this scholar Everyone. He seems to have written so much--all of it wrong."
Author Name
Personal Development
"From reading a previous answer, you know that I consider all those aspects to be part of American cultural myth and thus they figure into good American poetry, whether the poet is aware of what he is doing or not."
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Personal Development
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"In the past I have declined to comment on my own work: because, it seems to me, a poem is what it is; because a poem is itself a definition, and to try to redefine it is to be apt to falsify it; and because the author is the person least able to consider his work objectively."
Work
"The aim of the poet, or other artist, is first to make something; and it's impossible to make something out of words and not communicate."
Literature
"To change your phrase somewhat, I know that I like an art where disparate elements form an entity."
Art
"It is always pleasant to learn that someone takes an interest in a work which one enjoyed writing."
Work
"However, intention needn't enter in, and if a reader sees things in a religious way, and the work is dogmatically acceptable, then I don't see why it should not be interpreted in that way, as well as in others."
Work
"However, if a poem can be reduced to a prose sentence, there can't be much to it."
Literature
"Well, if this is poetry, I'm certainly never going to write any myself."
Poetry
"I do not usually revise much, though I often cut, particularly the end or toward the end of a poem."
Writing
"It seems to me that readers sometimes make the genesis of a poem more mysterious than it is (by that I perhaps mean, think of it as something outside their own experience)."
Reading
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