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I have a plot, but not much happens.

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
Plot
Happens
Much

More quotes by Howard Nemerov

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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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A teacher is a person who never says anything once.
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I've never read a political poem that's accomplished anything. Poetry makes things happen, but rarely what the poet wants.
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Children, to be illustrious is sad.
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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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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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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.
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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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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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I like all my children, even the squat and ugly ones.
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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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I would talk in iambic pentameter if it were easier.
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When modern writers gave up telling stories, they gave up the greatest thing we had.
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The secrets of success are a good wife and a steady job. My wife told me.
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History is where tensions were.
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Write what you know. That should leave you with a lot of free time.
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Once in awhile you have a thought, and you rhyme it.
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I sometimes talk about the making of a poem within the poem.
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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.
Howard Nemerov