Quote

Short stories amount for the most part to parlour tricks, party favours with built-in snappers, gadgets for including recognition and reversals

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
Part
Tricks
Recognition
Including
Reversals
Built
Parlour
Short
Favours
Amount
Reversal
Party
Gadgets
Stories
Favour

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When modern writers gave up telling stories, they gave up the greatest thing we had.
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Children, to be illustrious is sad.
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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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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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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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A teacher is a person who never says anything once.
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The secrets of success are a good wife and a steady job. My wife told me.
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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've never read a political poem that's accomplished anything. Poetry makes things happen, but rarely what the poet wants.
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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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Once in awhile you have a thought, and you rhyme it.
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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 have a plot, but not much happens.
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History is where tensions were.
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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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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.
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