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I like all my children, even the squat and ugly ones.

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
Squat
Ugly
Ones
Children
Even
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More quotes by Howard Nemerov

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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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Children, to be illustrious is sad.
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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'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.
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I have a plot, but not much happens.
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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 would talk in iambic pentameter if it were easier.
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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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A teacher is a person who never says anything once.
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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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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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[T]eaching has been for me an education (Lord knows what it has been for my students).
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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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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 I was starting to write, the great influence was T.S. Eliot and after that William Butler Yeats.
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When modern writers gave up telling stories, they gave up the greatest thing we had.
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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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When you write it doesn't occur to you that somebody could think different from what you do.
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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.
Howard Nemerov