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"I've been an inveterate reader of literary magazines since I was a teenager. There are always discoveries. You're sitting in your easy chair, reading; you realize you've read a story or a group of poems four times, and you know, Yes, I want to go farther with this writer."
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"Literature is analysis after the event."
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Personal Development

"When you think about the period in which Agatha Christie's crime novels were written, they are actually quite edgy for the time."
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Personal Development

"I cannot comprehend the neglect of a family library in such days as these."- Mr. Darcy."
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Personal Development

"There is a great deal to be said in favour of reading a novel backwards. The last page is as a rule the most interesting, and when one begins with the catastrophe or the dA©nouement one feels on pleasant terms of equality with the author. It is like going behind the scenes of a theatre. One is no longer taken in, and the hair-breadth escapes of the hero and the wild agonies of the heroine leave one absolutely unmoved. One knows the jealously guarded secret, and one can afford to smile at the quite unnecessary anxiety that the puppets of fiction always consider it their duty to display."
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Personal Development

"I have been used to consider poetry as "the food of love" said Darcy."Of a fine, stout, healthy love it may. Everything nourishes what isstrong already. But if it be only a slight, thin sort of inclination, Iam convinced that one good sonnet will starve it entirely away."
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Personal Development

"Maybe the example of Southern fiction writing has been so powerful that Southern poets have sort of keyed themselves to that."
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Personal Development

"All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril."
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Personal Development

"Books require titles reading them doesn't."
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Personal Development

"Anything approaching the change that came over his features I have never seen before, and hope never to see again. Oh, I wasn't touched. I was fascinated. It was as though a veil had been rent. I saw on that ivory face the expression of sombre pride, of ruthless power, of craven terror--of an intense and hopeless despair. Did he live his life again in every detail of desire, temptation, and surrender during that supreme moment of complete knowledge? He cried in a whisper at some image, at some vision--he cried out twice, a cry that was no more than a breath:The horror! The horror!"
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Personal Development

"Verses which do not teach men new and moving truths do not deserve to be read."
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"The ambiguities of language, both in terms of vocabulary and syntax, are fascinating: how important connotation is, what is lost and what is gained in the linguistic transition."
Language

"You are almost not free, if you are teaching a group of graduate students, to become friends with one of them. I don't mean anything erotically charged, just a friendship."
Friendship

"Translation is an interestingly different way to be involved both with poetry and with the language that I've found myself living in much of the time. I think the two feed each other."
Poetry

"I started to send my work to journals when I was 26, which was just a question of when I got the courage up. They were mostly journals I had been reading for the previous six or seven years."
Reading

"My mother was told she couldn't go to medical school because she was a woman and a Jew. So she became a teacher in the New York City public school system."
Medical

"There is something very satisfactory about being in the middle of something."
Being

"The pull between sound and syntax creates a kind of musical tension in the language that interests me."
Language

"I'm addicted to email, but other than that, there are practical things - being able to buy a book on the internet that you can't find in your local bookshop. This could be a lifeline if you live further from the sources."
Being

"Everyone thinks they're going to write one book of poems or one novel."
Poems

"I try to write everyday. I do that much better over here than when I'm teaching. I always rewrite, usually fairly close-on which is to say first draft, then put it aside for 24 hours then more drafts."
Writing
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