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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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Exlpore more Literature quotes
"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 Robert Morgan
"Philip Larkin has a tough honesty and sense of humor that I find irresistible, as a contemporary poet."
"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."
"Maybe the example of Southern fiction writing has been so powerful that Southern poets have sort of keyed themselves to that."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"It was less a literary thing than a linguistic, philosophical preoccupation... discovering how far you can go with language to create immediate, elementary 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."
"I learned to impersonate the kind of person that talks about poetry. It comes from teaching, I think."
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