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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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"As a reader you recognise that feeling when you're lost in a book? You know the one - when whatever's going on around you seems less real than what you're reading and all you want to do is keep going deeper into the story whether it's about being halfway up a mountain in Brazil in 1823 of in love with a man you aren't sure you can trust or fighting a war in the last human outpost, somewhere beyond the moon. Well, if you're writing that book it's real for you too."
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Personal Development

"The world of books is heavenly paradise."
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Personal Development

"Read good books to improve your life."
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Personal Development

"When someone tells me to 'just relax,' I wonder why they don't hand me a book?"
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Personal Development

"What's the use trying to read Shakespeare, especially in one of those little paper editions whose pages get ruffled, or stuck together with sea-water?"
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Personal Development

"I think that every reader on earth has a list of cherished books as unique as their fingerprints....I think that, as you age, you tend to gravitate towards the classics, but those aren't the books that give you the same sort of hope for the world that a cherished book does."
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Personal Development

"Easy reading is damn hard writing."
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Personal Development

"If time is precious, no book that will not improve by repeated readings deserves to be read at all."
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Personal Development

"Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body."
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Personal Development

"One kind of good book should leave you asking: how did the author know that about me?"
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"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

"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

"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."
Reading

"I'm addicted to email, but other than that, there are practical things - being able to buy a book on the internet that you can't find in your local bookshop. This could be a lifeline if you live further from the sources."
Being

"Everyone thinks they're going to write one book of poems or one novel."
Poems

"The woman poet must be either a sexless, reclusive eccentric, with nothing to say specifically to women, or a brilliant, tragic, tortured suicide."
Woman

"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

"The phenomenon of university creative writing programs doesn't exist in France. The whole idea is regarded as a novelty, or an oddity."
Creativity

"Good writing gives energy, whatever it is about."
Energy

"Community means people spending time together here, and I don't think there's really that."
Time
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