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I think there's one thing which distinguishes our art - we don't consider. We don't think. We write a little verse because it comes to us.

Howard Nemerov

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Howard Nemerov
Age: 71 †
Born: 1920
Born: February 29
Died: 1991
Died: July 5
Essayist
Novelist
Poet
University Teacher
Writer
New York City
New York
Thing
Consider
Think
Literature
Thinking
Comes
Write
Art
Littles
Distinguishes
Little
Verse
Writing
Verses

More quotes by Howard Nemerov

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A teacher is a person who never says anything once.
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When I was starting to write, the great influence was T.S. Eliot and after that William Butler Yeats.
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Shakespeare tells the same stories over and over in so many guises that it takes a long time before you notice.
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I think there was a revolution in poetry, associated chiefly with Eliot and Pound but maybe it is of the nature of revolutions or of the nature of history that their innovations should later come to look trivial or indistinguishable from technical tricks.
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History is one of those marvelous and necessary illusions we have to deal with. It's one of the ways of dealing with our world with impossible generalities which we couldn't live without.
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I have a plot, but not much happens.
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That so much of our experience, or the stereotype which passes for it should be dealt with by means of the short story is perhaps a symptom not unnoticeable elsewhere in the public domain of an unlovely cynicism about human character.
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Mostly the thought and the verse come inseparably. In my poem Poetics, it's as close as I come to telling how I do it.
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Absolute power corrupts absolutely and if you surrender your personal responsibility to a government which promises to take care of you, they will only take care of themselves.
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Why are stamps adorned with kings and presidents? That we may lick their hinder parts and thump their heads.
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The nice thing about the Bible is it doesn't give you too many facts. Two an a half lines and it tells you the whole story and that leaves you a great deal of freedom to elaborate on how it might have happened.
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Robert Frost had always said you mustn't think of the last line first, or it's only a fake poem, not a real one. I'm inclined to agree.
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I liked the kid who wrote me that he had to do a term paper on a modern poet and he was doing me because, though they say you have to read poems twice, he found he could handle mine in one try.
Howard Nemerov
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I like all my children, even the squat and ugly ones.
Howard Nemerov
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History is where tensions were.
Howard Nemerov
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It may be said that poems are in one way like icebergs: only about a third of their bulk appears above the surface of the page.
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When modern writers gave up telling stories, they gave up the greatest thing we had.
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I am not at all clear what free verse is anymore. That's one of the things you learn not to know.
Howard Nemerov
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Write what you know. That should leave you with a lot of free time.
Howard Nemerov
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When you write it doesn't occur to you that somebody could think different from what you do.
Howard Nemerov