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"Translation makes me look at how a poem is put together in a different way, without the personal investment of the poem I'm writing myself, but equally closely technically."
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"Writing. Is it a way to be remembered,or a need to become immortal?"

"I know nothing in the world that has as much power as a word. Sometimes I write one, and I look at it, until it begins to shine."

"Between the lines of every book the writer reveals their own secrets."

"My whole theory of writing I can sum up in one sentence. An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmasters of ever afterward."

"I've always considered writing the most hateful kind of work. I suspect it's a bit like fucking, which is only fun for amateurs. Old whores don't do much giggling."

"Write with the door closed, rewrite with the door open."

"Scotland consistently produces world-class writers."

"Actually, the 14 novels were written over a period of just over 6 years."

"When one is writing a novel in the first person, one must be that person."
Explore more quotes by Marilyn Hacker

"I have experienced healing through other writers' poetry, but there's no way I can sit down to write in the hope a poem will have healing potential. If I do, I'll write a bad poem."

"Perhaps first and foremost is the challenge of taking what I find as a reader and making it into a poem that, primarily, has to be a plausible poem in English."

"Clearly, once the student is no longer a student the possibilities of relationship are enlarged."

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

"I wonder what it means about American literary culture and its transmission when I consider the number of American poets who earn their living teaching creative writing in universities. I've ended up doing that myself."

"We sometimes received - and I would read - 200 manuscripts a week. Some of them were wonderful, some were terrible; most were mediocre. It was like the gifts of the good and bad fairies."

"Of the individual poems, some are more lyric and some are more descriptive or narrative. Each poem is fixed in a moment. All those moments written or read together take on the movement and architecture of a narrative."

"Poetry seems to have been eliminated as a literary genre, and installed instead, as a kind of spiritual aerobic exercise - nobody need read it, but anybody can do it."

"I don't know whether a poem has be there to help to develop something. I think it's there for itself, for what the reader finds in it."
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