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"Then, of course, there are those sad occasions when a poet or a writer has not grown, and one has to let them go because they're just not making headway. But we have a very clear personal relationship with the authors."
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"I don't know where people got the idea that characters in books are supposed to be likable. Books are not in the business of creating merely likeable characters with whom you can have some simple identification with. Books are in the business of creating great stories that make you're brain go ahhbdgbdmerhbergurhbudgerbudbaaarr."
"Writers may be classified as meteors, planets, and fixed stars. They belong not to one system, one nation only, but to the universe. And just because they are so very far away, it is usually many years before their light is visible to the inhabitants of this earth."
"This is not writing at all. Indeed, I could say that Shakespeare surpasses literature altogether, if I knew what I meant."
"I've read everything Thomas Wolfe ever wrote; my brother and I memorized whole chapters of 'You Can't Go Home Again' and 'Look Homeward, Angel.'"
"In our Impulsive nature to write and repulsive nature to read that has led to a decline in literary genius in our times!"
"You could fire a machine gun randomly through the pages of Lord of the Rings and never hit any women."
"I think that [William] Faulkner and I each had to escape certain particulars of our lives, and we found salvation through words. I understand the Bible story of Babel so much better now. I think that moments of extremity, desires of escape, lead us to foreign languages--not those learned in schools, but those plucked from the human heart, the searing conditions of isolation. I did not have to be limited to my biography because of words, and I shared this with Faulkner, who invented new words and punctuation and expression and worlds. He utterly reshaped the world."
"Individuals often turn to poetry, not only to glean strength and perspective from the words of others, but to give birth to their own poetic voices and to hold history accountable for the catastrophes rearranging their lives."
"Fictional people are people, too, otherwise why would we care what happens to them?"
"..holding a book but reading the empty spaces."
Explore more quotes by James Laughlin
"I think that is where poetry reading becomes such an individual thing. I mean I have friend who like poets who just don't say anything to me at all, I mean they seem to me rather ordinary and pedestrian."
"I think that concrete poetry seems to have, as far as I can see, come to a kind of a dead end. It doesn't seem to be going any further than it went in its high period of about five or six years ago."
"I think one ages and one dates. I tend to have a good deal of difficulty in liking some of the new poets."
"There are numerous cases of that, where one of our writers discovers another writer whom he likes, and we then take that book on. So it's a very close relationship. We can do that because we're so small."
"Often something comes in from which you can see that the person is good, the book may not be perfect as it is, and the person doesn't want to do a re-write. That's something we do almost nothing of."
"I think there's no excuse for the American poetry reader not knowing a good deal about what is going on in the rest of the world."
"Every now and then, I strike something that just goes click, you know, in my head. As Gertrude Stein used to say, it rings the bell, and I feel, this is great."
"Concrete poets continue to turn out beautiful things, but to me they're more visual than oral, and they almost really belong on the wall rather than in a book. I haven't the least idea of where poetry is going."
"The German experience, as you can see, did move me very much. Seeing that terrible destruction and seeing the miserable state of the people, how they had been beaten down by the war through no fault of their own probably."
"We don't attempt to have any theme for a number of the anthology, or to have any particular sequence. We just put in things that we like, and then we try to alternate the prose and the poetry."
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