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"Maybe the example of Southern fiction writing has been so powerful that Southern poets have sort of keyed themselves to that."
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"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."
Author Name
Personal Development

"Good characters in fiction are the very devil. Not only because most authors have too little material to make them of, but because we as readers have a strong subconscious wish to find them incredible."
Author Name
Personal Development

"I don't know where people got the idea that characters in books are supposed to be likable. Books are not in the business of creating merely likeable characters with whom you can have some simple identification with. Books are in the business of creating great stories that make you're brain go ahhbdgbdmerhbergurhbudgerbudbaaarr."
Author Name
Personal Development

"Which is my favourite author??You have mistake it must be authors I have a lot of favourite authors, which is my book, opps again a mistake, it must be books..."
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Personal Development

"Tell me of your Willoughbys, Heathcliffs and Wickhams in literature and I will tell you I met them all."
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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

"I read to know the past, I write to express my love for the future."
Author Name
Personal Development

"I appreciate a book intended to be judged by its cover. The insincere readers are often weeded out while the sincere readers remain curious."
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Personal Development

"You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style."
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Personal Development

"I often like to enjoy the beauty of a beautiful book."
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"I don't think American poetry has gotten any better in the past 35 years. Oddly enough, creative writing programs seem to have been good for fiction, and I would not have predicted that."
Poetry

"Maybe the example of Southern fiction writing has been so powerful that Southern poets have sort of keyed themselves to that."
Literature

"I love to create interesting textures with language. You can do it as long as it seems like a discovery."
Love

"Part of what we love about poetry is the fact that it seems ancient, that it has an authority of ancient language and ancient form, and that it's timeless, that it reaches back."
Love

"I learned to impersonate the kind of person that talks about poetry. It comes from teaching, I think."
Poetry

"I tell students they will know they are getting somewhere when a scene is so painful they can just barely bring themselves to write about it. A writer has to draw blood."
Blood

"Our most famous writers are Faulkner and Eudora Welty and Flannery O'Connor. It would make sense that the poetry would reflect some of those same values, some of the same techniques."
Poetry

"The fact that something is in a rhymed form or in blank verse will not make it good poetry."
Poetry

"Some people swear by writing courses, but whether it really helps American poetry, I have doubts."
Poetry

"The best books of our times have included the three mature volumes of Philip Larkin. They're very short books of poems, and very carefully arranged."
Books
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