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"I started to send my work to journals when I was 26, which was just a question of when I got the courage up. They were mostly journals I had been reading for the previous six or seven years."
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"I find it's impossible for me to read Proust."
Author Name
Personal Development
"I concentrate on the lives of individuals whom the reader comes to know and feel with intimately."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Not a single person I named hadn't already been named at least a half-dozen times and wasn't already on he blacklist."
Author Name
Personal Development
"I've never know any trouble than an hour's reading didn't assuage."
Author Name
Personal Development
"By reading Huckleberry Finn I felt I was able to justify my act of going into the mountain forest at night and sleeping among the trees with a sense of security which I could never find indoors."
Author Name
Personal Development
"And so we have to be careful with looking at additional stimulus that we don't provoke an increase in the bond rate and then offset a lot of the stimulus we've already got."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Well, I think everything I've ever read contributes to the background from which I write."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Culture means, I think, that you have widened your experience enough through reading and through being a little bit thoughtful about these things that it has changed your outlook in some ways. And not necessarily made you a better human being but made you see things."
Author Name
Personal Development
"And, finally, Lincoln was not a good impromptu speaker; he was at his best when he could read from a carefully prepared manuscript. Though maybe a teleprompter could have helped that!"
Author Name
Personal Development
"Never read a book through merely because you have begun it."
Author Name
Personal Development
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"As a teacher you are more or less obliged to pay the same amount of attention to everything. That can wear you down."
Attention
"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."
Help
"I try to write everyday. I do that much better over here than when I'm teaching. I always rewrite, usually fairly close-on which is to say first draft, then put it aside for 24 hours then more drafts."
Writing
"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
"Good writing gives energy, whatever it is about."
Energy
"The phenomenon of university creative writing programs doesn't exist in France. The whole idea is regarded as a novelty, or an oddity."
Creativity
"I've been an inveterate reader of literary magazines since I was a teenager. There are always discoveries. You're sitting in your easy chair, reading; you realize you've read a story or a group of poems four times, and you know, Yes, I want to go farther with this writer."
Literature
"The woman poet must be either a sexless, reclusive eccentric, with nothing to say specifically to women, or a brilliant, tragic, tortured suicide."
Woman
"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
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