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"I have learned so much from working with other poets, travelling and reading with them, spending days discussing poems in progress. There is the sense that we are all, as writers, part of something which is more powerful than any of us."
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"If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all."
Author Name
Personal Development
"I read a lot, but I read about the areas that I'm interested in."
Author Name
Personal Development
"When someone tells me to 'just relax,' I wonder why they don't hand me a book?"
Author Name
Personal Development
"I had been a student in Vienna, and one of the neat little things I had found out was about that zoo. It was a good debut novel for me to have published. I was 26 or 27 when it was published. I already had a kid and would soon have a second."
Author Name
Personal Development
"All over the country, they're reading about me, and the story doesn't center on me being gay. It's just about a gay person who is doing his job."
Author Name
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?"
Author Name
Personal Development
"Her reputation for reading a great deal hung about her like the cloudy envelope of a goddess in an epic."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Read over your compositions, and when you meet a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out."
Author Name
Personal Development
"I probably read 100 times more than I write, but that way when I move my characters through it, I know."
Author Name
Personal Development
"And that's how I start myself. I usually go back a couple of pages, maybe to the beginning of the chapter, and I start reading. And as I'm reading, I'm tweaking - putting in a different word, changing the syntax, putting that clause over there, you know that sort of thing."
Author Name
Personal Development
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"Writing poetry makes you intensely conscious of how words sound, both aloud and inside the head of the reader. You learn the weight of words and how they sound to the ear."
Poetry
"Poets go through a very tough apprenticeship in the use of words."
Poet
"I can remember being in my pram: children stayed in their prams much longer then than they do now. A big bouncy pram with black covers and a hood with metal clips that could trap your fingers. I was looking up at my sister who was sitting on the pram seat, with her back to me."
Family
"My first collection of poems was published by Bloodaxe Books, which was then a very new imprint."
Books
"As individuals, we are shaped by story from the time of birth; we are formed by what we are told by our parents, our teachers, our intimates."
Time
"If we understand the past, we are more likely to recognise what is happening around us."
Past
"I enjoy research; in fact research is so engaging that it would be easy to go on for years, and never write the novel at all."
Fact
"Writing children's books gives a writer a very strong sense of narrative drive."
Books
"Mourning Ruby is not a flat landscape: it is more like a box with pictures painted on every face. And each face is also a door which opens, I hope, to take the reader deep into the book."
Hope
"Fiction came quite a while later. I began with short stories and fiction for children."
Family
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