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"I wonder what it means about American literary culture and its transmission when I consider the number of American poets who earn their living teaching creative writing in universities. I've ended up doing that myself."
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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."
Author Name
Personal Development
"A book is a garden, an orchard, a storehouse, a party, a company by the way, a counselor, a multitude of counselors."
Author Name
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."
Author Name
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
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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
"Paris is a wonderful city. I can't say I belong to an especially anglophone community."
Community
"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
"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
"I wonder what it means about American literary culture and its transmission when I consider the number of American poets who earn their living teaching creative writing in universities. I've ended up doing that myself."
Literature
"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
"The phenomenon of university creative writing programs doesn't exist in France. The whole idea is regarded as a novelty, or an oddity."
Creativity
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