Quote

I encourage students to pursue an idea far enough so they can see what the cliches and stereotypes are. Only then do they begin to hit pay dirt.

Robert Morgan

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Robert Morgan
Age: 80
Born: 1944
Born: October 3
Biographer
Novelist
Poet
Hendersonville
North Carolina
Ideas
Dirt
Enough
Encourage
Encouragement
Pursue
Begin
Cliches
Students
Stereotypes
Pay
Cliche
Idea
Stereotype

More quotes by Robert Morgan

Image
Young writers only take off when they find their subjects. Since almost everyone has a family and stories about family, that is often a place to start.
Robert Morgan
Image
The young people have MTV and rock and roll. Why would they go to read poetry? Poetry belongs to the Stone Age. It awakens in us perceptions that go back to those times.
Robert Morgan
Image
It was less a literary thing than a linguistic, philosophical preoccupation... discovering how far you can go with language to create immediate, elementary experience.
Robert Morgan
Image
If a poem is not memorable, there's probably something wrong. One of the problems of free verse is that much of the free verse poetry is not memorable.
Robert Morgan
Image
Young writers find their first audience in little magazines, and experimental writers find their only audience there.
Robert Morgan
Image
We don't want to live in the dark moods of imponderable mystery, but neither do we want to miss them altogether. they allow us to emerge from the tender sadness of the manger to sing with the angels in the skies above.
Robert Morgan
Image
Poetry, almost by definition, calls attention to its language and form.
Robert Morgan
Image
A lot of my students are Asian-American, and it has been thrilling to watch them break through the stereotypes into something alive and surprising.
Robert Morgan
Image
When you have an idea for a story, you want those characters to reach as many people as you can. I think you normally think of prose as a way of doing that. It fits our time, the culture.
Robert Morgan
Image
Some people swear by writing courses, but whether it really helps American poetry, I have doubts.
Robert Morgan
Image
The decision to write in prose instead of poetry is made more by the readers than by writers. Almost no one is interested in reading narrative in verse.
Robert Morgan
Image
One of the most powerful devices is to distort time, to go from human time to atomic time, geologic time. Sometimes you can actually accomplish that, with one unexpected word choice.
Robert Morgan
Image
Alchemy is the art of far and near, and I think poetry is alchemy in that way. It's delightful to distort size, to see something that's tiny as though it were vast.
Robert Morgan
Image
I think that it's more likely that in my 60s and 70s I will be writing poetry rather than fiction.
Robert Morgan
Image
In the later books I am much more at home in the use of language to describe things. I had never thought of that until a critic pointed that out.
Robert Morgan
Image
Fiction is about intimacy with characters, events, places.
Robert Morgan
Image
Teaching writing over the years intrudes on your own writing in important ways, taking away some of the excitement of poetry.
Robert Morgan
Image
Maybe the example of Southern fiction writing has been so powerful that Southern poets have sort of keyed themselves to that.
Robert Morgan
Image
I did not have a very literary background. I came to poetry from the sciences and mathematics, and also through an interest in Japanese and Chinese poetry in translation.
Robert Morgan
Image
In the best fiction, the language itself can become almost invisible.
Robert Morgan