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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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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
Different
Writing
Think
Thinking
Occur
Somebody
Literature
Write
Doesn

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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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I have a plot, but not much happens.
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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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The secrets of success are a good wife and a steady job. My wife told me.
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Once in awhile you have a thought, and you rhyme it.
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Short stories amount for the most part to parlour tricks, party favours with built-in snappers, gadgets for including recognition and reversals
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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.
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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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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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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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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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When modern writers gave up telling stories, they gave up the greatest thing we had.
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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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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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A teacher is a person who never says anything once.
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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.
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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 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.
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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.
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