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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
Thinking
Comes
Write
Art
Littles
Distinguishes
Little
Verse
Writing
Verses
Thing
Consider
Think
Literature

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I have a plot, but not much happens.
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I would talk in iambic pentameter if it were easier.
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Occasionally a student writer comes up with something really beautiful and moving, and you won't know for years if it was an accident or the first burst of something wonderful.
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Once in awhile you have a thought, and you rhyme it.
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History is where tensions were.
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When you write it doesn't occur to you that somebody could think different from what you do.
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Children, to be illustrious is sad.
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A teacher is a person who never says anything once.
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I sometimes talk about the making of a poem within the poem.
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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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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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I like all my children, even the squat and ugly ones.
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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.
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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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The historian is terribly responsible to what he can discern are the facts of the case, but he's nothing if he doesn't make out a case.
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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.
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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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Write what you know. That should leave you with a lot of free time.
Howard Nemerov
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[T]eaching has been for me an education (Lord knows what it has been for my students).
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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.
Howard Nemerov