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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

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

More quotes by Howard Nemerov

Image
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
Image
History is where tensions were.
Howard Nemerov
Image
I like all my children, even the squat and ugly ones.
Howard Nemerov
Image
Shakespeare tells the same stories over and over in so many guises that it takes a long time before you notice.
Howard Nemerov
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Why are stamps adorned with kings and presidents? That we may lick their hinder parts and thump their heads.
Howard Nemerov
Image
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
Image
When you write it doesn't occur to you that somebody could think different from what you do.
Howard Nemerov
Image
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
Image
I sometimes talk about the making of a poem within the poem.
Howard Nemerov
Image
Children, to be illustrious is sad.
Howard Nemerov
Image
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.
Howard Nemerov
Image
Short stories amount for the most part to parlour tricks, party favours with built-in snappers, gadgets for including recognition and reversals
Howard Nemerov
Image
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.
Howard Nemerov
Image
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
Image
Write what you know. That should leave you with a lot of free time.
Howard Nemerov
Image
When modern writers gave up telling stories, they gave up the greatest thing we had.
Howard Nemerov
Image
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
Image
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