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"Reading should be a repeat performance."
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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."
"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?"
"He who dreads hostility too much is unfit to rule."
Explore more quotes by John Barton
"Most victims of my autobiographical verse are either far too polite, remarkably understanding unaware that I have written poems about them."
"An experienced reader uses the poem as an agent of inquiry. This makes poetry very exciting, unstable, and interactive."
"We are comfortable with the fact that we cannot know personally what happened in the world before we were born, yet we are uncomfortable with the notion that we will stop engaging with time at some point in the future."
"I have become intrigued with the combining of seemingly unrelated ideas or images, or the drawing upon the many, sometimes dissimilar, meanings a word might have."
"Poetry is but another form of inquiry into the nature of phenomena, using with its own unique procedures and tools."
"Poets can't resist the dramatic pull of their lives and so inevitably write autobiographical verse."
"Writing can sometimes be exploitative. I like to take a few steps of remove in order to respect the privacy of the subject. If readers make the link, they have engaged with the poem."
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