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"The pleasure that I take in writing gets me interested in writing a poem. It's not a statement about what I think anybody else should be doing. For me, it's an interesting tension between interior and exterior."
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"Good writing gives energy, whatever it is about."
Energy
"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."
Challenge
"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."
Poetry
"Everyone thinks they're going to write one book of poems or one novel."
Poems
"The phenomenon of university creative writing programs doesn't exist in France. The whole idea is regarded as a novelty, or an oddity."
Creativity
"There is a way in which all writing is connected. In a second language, for example, a workshop can liberate the students' use of the vocabulary they're acquiring."
Education
"Translation is an interestingly different way to be involved both with poetry and with the language that I've found myself living in much of the time. I think the two feed each other."
Poetry
"When you translate poetry in particular, you're obliged to look at how the writer with whom you're working puts together words, sentences, phrases, the triple tension between the line of verse, the syntax and the sentence."
Poetry
"The woman poet must be either a sexless, reclusive eccentric, with nothing to say specifically to women, or a brilliant, tragic, tortured suicide."
Woman
"The ambiguities of language, both in terms of vocabulary and syntax, are fascinating: how important connotation is, what is lost and what is gained in the linguistic transition."
Language
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"To kill a relative of whom you are tired is something. But to inherit his property afterwards, that is genuine pleasure."
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Personal Development
"Drink the nectar of love from the flowers of life."
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Personal Development
"Pleasure is often spoiled by describing it."
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Personal Development
"There is no Pleasure like that of receiving Praise from the Praiseworthy."
Author Name
Personal Development
"The mere brute pleasure of reading - the sort of pleasure a cow must have in grazing."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Joy is not a substitute for sex, sex is very often a substitute for Joy. I sometimes wonder whether all pleasures are not substitutes for Joy."
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Personal Development
"I know that two and two make four - and should be glad to prove it too if I could - though I must say if by any sort of process I could convert 2 and 2 into five it would give me much greater pleasure."
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Personal Development
"Abstainer: a weak person who yields to the temptation of denying himself a pleasure."
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Personal Development
"A tavern chair is the throne of human felicity."
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Personal Development
"... I experienced, suddenly, that special pleasure, which bore no resemblance to any other..."
Author Name
Personal Development
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