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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.

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
Comes
Accident
Beautiful
Student
Firsts
Accidents
First
Students
Something
Writer
Years
Wonderful
Really
Literature
Burst
Moving
Occasionally

More quotes by Howard Nemerov

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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
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Why are stamps adorned with kings and presidents? That we may lick their hinder parts and thump their heads.
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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I have a plot, but not much happens.
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.
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
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The secrets of success are a good wife and a steady job. My wife told me.
Howard Nemerov
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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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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.
Howard Nemerov
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Children, to be illustrious is sad.
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 sometimes talk about the making of a poem within the poem.
Howard Nemerov
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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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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
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I like all my children, even the squat and ugly ones.
Howard Nemerov
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[T]eaching has been for me an education (Lord knows what it has been for my students).
Howard Nemerov
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When I was starting to write, the great influence was T.S. Eliot and after that William Butler Yeats.
Howard Nemerov
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A teacher is a person who never says anything once.
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.
Howard Nemerov
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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