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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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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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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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[T]eaching has been for me an education (Lord knows what it has been for my students).
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Once in awhile you have a thought, and you rhyme it.
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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 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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Why are stamps adorned with kings and presidents? That we may lick their hinder parts and thump their heads.
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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.
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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A teacher is a person who never says anything once.
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When modern writers gave up telling stories, they gave up the greatest thing we had.
Howard Nemerov
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Children, to be illustrious is sad.
Howard Nemerov
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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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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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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
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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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I like all my children, even the squat and ugly ones.
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