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"The best books of our times have included the three mature volumes of Philip Larkin. They're very short books of poems, and very carefully arranged."
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"Thanks to bad graphic design, some readers love only the electronic version of some books."
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Personal Development
"Books that you carry to the fire, and hold readily in your hand, are most useful after all."
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Personal Development
"The multitude of books is making us ignorant."
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Personal Development
"I don't believe in personal immortality; the only way I expect to have some version of such a thing is through my books."
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Personal Development
"The oldest books are only just out to those who have not read them."
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Personal Development
"Books are the perfect entertainment: no commercials, no batteries, hours of enjoyment for each dollar spent. What I wonder is why everybody doesn't carry a book around for those inevitable dead spots in life."
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Personal Development
"A book, too, can be a star 'explosive material, capable of stirring up fresh life endlessly."
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Personal Development
"I've got a long list of books I wish I'd never written-and I've kept them all out of print for the past 20 years."
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Personal Development
"I had forgotten what fiction was to me as a boy, forgotten what it was like in the library: fiction was an escape from the intolerable, a doorway into impossibly hospitable worlds where things had rules and could be understood; stories had been a way of learning about life without experiencing it, or perhaps of experiencing it as an eighteenth-century poisoner dealt with poisons, taking them in tiny doses, such that the poisoner could cope with ingesting things that would kill someone who was not inured to them. Sometimes fiction is a way of coping with the poison of the world in a way that lets us survive it."
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Personal Development
"If you want to publish two books a year under your own name and your publisher doesn't, maybe you need a different publisher."
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"Philip Larkin has a tough honesty and sense of humor that I find irresistible, as a contemporary poet."
Humor
"The young people have MTV and rock and roll. Why would they go to read poetry? Poetry belongs to the Stone Age. It awakens in us perceptions that go back to those times."
Poetry
"Maybe the example of Southern fiction writing has been so powerful that Southern poets have sort of keyed themselves to that."
Literature
"I don't think American poetry has gotten any better in the past 35 years. Oddly enough, creative writing programs seem to have been good for fiction, and I would not have predicted that."
Poetry
"The Language Poets are writing only about language itself. The Ashbery poets are writing only about poetry itself. That seems to me a kind of dead end."
Poetry
"The great watershed of modern poetry is French, more than English."
Poetry
"One of the most powerful devices is to distort time, to go from human time to atomic time, geologic time. Sometimes you can actually accomplish that, with one unexpected word choice."
Time
"It was less a literary thing than a linguistic, philosophical preoccupation... discovering how far you can go with language to create immediate, elementary experience."
Experience
"I don't think poetry is something that can be taught. We can encourage young writers, but what you can't teach them is the very essence of poetry."
Poetry
"I learned to impersonate the kind of person that talks about poetry. It comes from teaching, I think."
Poetry
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