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I am a crass and ignorant person who considers all poetry, from Shakespeare on

—Paul Rudnick

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If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only ways I know it. Is there any other way?

—Emily Dickinson

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I love writing poetry but it's taken time, like a difficult courtship that leads to a good marriage, for us to get to know each other. I wrote poetry for seven years to learn how to write a sentence because I really wanted to write novels and I figured that I couldn't write a novel until I could write a sentence.

—Richard Brautigan

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There are days when the result is so bad that no fewer than five revisions are required. In contrast, when I'm greatly inspired, only four revisions are needed.

—John Kenneth Galbraith

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A writer is unfair to himself when he is unable to be hard on himself.

—Marianne Moore

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Like every writer, he measured the virtues of other writers by their performance, and asked that they measure him by what he conjectured or planned.

—Jorge Luis Borges

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To get the right word in the right place is a rare achievement. To condense the diffused light of a page of thought into the luminous flash of a single sentence is worthy to rank as a prize composition just by itself. . . . Anybody can have ideas — the difficulty is to express them without squandering a quire of paper on an idea that ought to be reduced to one glittering paragraph.

—Mark Twain

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I think I succeeded as a writer because I did not come out of an English department. I used to write in the chemistry department. And I wrote some good stuff. If I had been in the English department, the prof would have looked at my short stories, congratulated me on my talent, and then showed me how Joyce or Hemingway handled the same elements of the short story. The prof would have placed me in competition with the greatest writers of all time, and that would have ended my writing career.

—Kurt Vonnegut

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talent career writing English
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The worst thing that can happen to a writer is to become a Writer.

—Mary McCarthy

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To expect too much compassion from yourself might be a little destructive of your own existence. Even so, at least make a try, and this goes not only for individuals but also for life itself. It's so easy. It's a fashionable idiocy of youth to say the world has not come up to your expectations. "What? I was coming, and this is all they could prepare for me?" Throw it out. Have compassion for the world and those in it.

—Joseph Campbell

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I could hear my heart beating. I could hear everyone's heart. I could hear the human noise we sat there making, not one of us moving, not even when the room went dark.

—Raymond Carver

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Your life will have a kind of perfection, although you will not be a saint. The perfection will consist in this: you will be very weak and you will make many mistakes; you will be awkward, for you will be poor in spirit and hunger and thirst for justice. You will not be perfect, but you will love. This is the gate and the way. . . . There is nothing greater than love. There is nothing more true than love, nothing more real.

—Eberhard Arnold

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A million light years and a million more / would not give time enough to store / that small second of eternity / when I took you in my arms / and you took me in yours

—Jacques Prévert

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We are not the same persons this year as last; nor are those we love. It is a happy chance if we, changing, continue to love a changed person.

—W. Somerset Maugham

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Our marriage license turned out to be a learner's permit.

—Joan Rivers

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humor learning marriage divorce
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