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"Given the devaluation of literature and of the study of foreign languages per se in the United States, as well as the preponderance of theory over text in graduate literature studies, creative writing programs keep literature courses populated."
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"The best of fiction, as we know, of course, doesn't tell the truth; it tales the truth."
Author Name
Personal Development

"Character in decay is the theme of the great bulk of superior fiction."
Author Name
Personal Development

"Stories are like children. They grow in their own way."
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Personal Development

"In great literature, I become a thousand different men but still remain myself."
Author Name
Personal Development

"It is my opinion that a story worth reading only in childhood is not worth reading even then."
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Personal Development

"I found it hard to think of leaving my books. They had been my elevators out of the midden, and to whom could I entrust such close friends?"
Author Name
Personal Development

"It is usually unbearably painful to read a book by an author who knows way less than you do, unless the book is a novel."
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Personal Development

"Literature becomes the living memory of a nation."
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Personal Development

"As a novelist it is my job to tell stories that inspire and entertain but I am increasingly mindful that many of these historical tales (which of themselves are fascinating) relate directly to our issues in society today."
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Personal Development

"I am not sure that the best way to make a boy love the English poets might not be forbid him to read them and then make sure that he had plenty of opportunities to disobey you."
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Personal Development
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"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."
Pleasure

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

"Given the devaluation of literature and of the study of foreign languages per se in the United States, as well as the preponderance of theory over text in graduate literature studies, creative writing programs keep literature courses populated."
Literature

"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

"You are almost not free, if you are teaching a group of graduate students, to become friends with one of them. I don't mean anything erotically charged, just a friendship."
Friendship

"Of the individual poems, some are more lyric and some are more descriptive or narrative. Each poem is fixed in a moment. All those moments written or read together take on the movement and architecture of a narrative."
Architecture

"Clearly, once the student is no longer a student the possibilities of relationship are enlarged."
Education

"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

"When you translate poetry in particular, you're obliged to look at how the writer with whom you're working puts together words, sentences, phrases, the triple tension between the line of verse, the syntax and the sentence."
Poetry

"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."
Living
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