Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
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.
Howard Nemerov
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
TAGS & TOPICS
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
Years
Wonderful
Really
Literature
Burst
Moving
Occasionally
Comes
Accident
Beautiful
Student
Firsts
Accidents
First
Students
Something
Writer
More quotes by Howard Nemerov
Write what you know. That should leave you with a lot of free time.
Howard Nemerov
I have a plot, but not much happens.
Howard Nemerov
When I was starting to write, the great influence was T.S. Eliot and after that William Butler Yeats.
Howard Nemerov
Shakespeare tells the same stories over and over in so many guises that it takes a long time before you notice.
Howard Nemerov
I've never read a political poem that's accomplished anything. Poetry makes things happen, but rarely what the poet wants.
Howard Nemerov
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
The secrets of success are a good wife and a steady job. My wife told me.
Howard Nemerov
I like all my children, even the squat and ugly ones.
Howard Nemerov
History is where tensions were.
Howard Nemerov
[T]eaching has been for me an education (Lord knows what it has been for my students).
Howard Nemerov
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.
Howard Nemerov
I am not at all clear what free verse is anymore. That's one of the things you learn not to know.
Howard Nemerov
This Constitutional Republic called America is an historic aberration. Any honest student of history will note that the prevailing socio-economic system is feudalism, where a tiny minority control the vast majority of wealth, power, and resources. In doing so, they have absolute control over the 99% of the population. Power equals control.
Howard Nemerov
When you write it doesn't occur to you that somebody could think different from what you do.
Howard Nemerov
Once in awhile you have a thought, and you rhyme it.
Howard Nemerov
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
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
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
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
I would talk in iambic pentameter if it were easier.
Howard Nemerov
