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"Young writers find their first audience in little magazines, and experimental writers find their only audience there."
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"Chekhov was capable of casually tossing off deplorable comments in his letters, combined with a very modern anger against anti-Semitism."
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"The magic and the danger of fiction is this: it allows us to see through other eyes. It takes us to places we have never been, allows us to care about, worry about, laugh with, and cry for people who do not, outside of the story, exist. There are people who think that things that happen in fiction do not really happen. These people are wrong."
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"I love stories that suck you in, that you can't stop reading because you are quite simply there."
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"It was pretty silly quoting poetry around free and easy like that. It was the act of a silly damn snob. Give man a few lines of verse and he thinks he's the Lord of all Creation. You think you can walk on water with all your books. Well, the world can get by just fine without them."
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"Alexander the Great slept with 'The Iliad' beneath his pillow. Though I've never led an army, I am a wanderer. I cradle 'The Odyssey' nights while the moon is waning, as if it were the sweet body of a woman."
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"Verses which do not teach men new and moving truths do not deserve to be read."
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Personal Development
"For several years, while I searched for, found, and studied black women writers, I deliberately shut O'Connor out, feeling almost ashamed that she had reached me first. And yet, even when I no longer read her, I missed her, and realized that though the rest of America might not mind, having endured it so long, I would never be satisfied with a segregated literature. I would have to read Zora Hurston and Flannery O'Connor, Nella Larsen and Carson McCullers, Jean Toomer and William Faulkner, before I could begin to feel well read at all."
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"In reading we have to allow the sunken meanings to remain sunken, suggested, not stated; lapsing and flowing into each other like reeds on the bed of a river."
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Personal Development
"And please, stay away from those books you devour. They are putting the most fantastical tales into your head."
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Personal Development
"Yet who reads to bring about an end, however desirable? Are there not some pursuits that we practise because they are good in themselves, and some pleasures that are final? And is not this among them? I have sometimes dreamt, at least, that when the Day of Judgment dawns and the great conquerors and lawyers and statesmen come to receive their rewards, their crowns, their laurels, their names carved indelibly upon imperishable marble, the Almighty will turn to Peter and will say, not without a certain envy when he sees us coming with our books under our arms, "Look, these need no reward. We have nothing to give them here. They have loved reading."
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"What actually makes poetry poetry is of course impossible to define. We recognize it when we hear it, when we see it, but we can't define it."
Poetry
"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."
Books
"I love to create interesting textures with language. You can do it as long as it seems like a discovery."
Love
"Maybe the example of Southern fiction writing has been so powerful that Southern poets have sort of keyed themselves to that."
Literature
"Southern poets are still writing narrative poems, poems in forms, dramatic poems."
Poems
"Our most famous writers are Faulkner and Eudora Welty and Flannery O'Connor. It would make sense that the poetry would reflect some of those same values, some of the same techniques."
Poetry
"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
"In the best fiction, the language itself can become almost invisible."
Fiction
"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
"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
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