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"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."
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Exlpore more Writing quotes
"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."
"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."
"Her love of words is a private passion - one she would rather not share. In the house of her childhood though everything had to be shared. If she tried to hold anything back, they would search and find the hidden places. Her written words, discovered, read were just the source of more pain and punishment. This was why she loved poetry. They did not always understand it so they left it alone."
Explore more quotes by Marilyn Hacker
"The pull between sound and syntax creates a kind of musical tension in the language that interests me."
"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 think there is something about coming to a city to work that puts you in touch with it in a different way."
"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."
"As a teacher you are more or less obliged to pay the same amount of attention to everything. That can wear you down."
"I lived in the studio apartment that I bought for four years before I bought it in 1989, so I was already in it. I began living there in 1985, so I've had the same address and phone number since then."
"The phenomenon of university creative writing programs doesn't exist in France. The whole idea is regarded as a novelty, or an oddity."
"The woman poet must be either a sexless, reclusive eccentric, with nothing to say specifically to women, or a brilliant, tragic, tortured suicide."
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