Nick Laird

“an English girl might well believe that time is how you spend your love.”

— Nick Laird

There is such a shelter in each other.

— Nick Laird

“We would all rather be loved for what we seem to be.”

— Nick Laird

You become a writer because you like to be alone in a room with your books.

— Nick Laird

I don't think there's any law where you have to read a poem and immediately understand it.

— Nick Laird

She was privileged enough to feel at home anywhere, and to equate squalor with authenticity.

— Nick Laird

The reason that the book exists is because there was a gap in you. You wrote the book to fulfill that gap…

— Nick Laird

“There is no privilege as great as that enjoyed by those 'To Whom Things Come Easily'.”

— Nick Laird

“He unzipped his hooded top and took it off, and wished emotions were like clothes, that he could remove them, fold them,…

— Nick Laird

That's what Samuel Johnson said: "Read over your compositions, and wherever you meet with a passage which you think particularly fine, strike…

— Nick Laird

Cargo cults fascinate me partly because Christianity itself is in many ways a cargo cult.

— Nick Laird

There used to be one writer rather than a team of writers. It's the old line about a camel being a horse…

— Nick Laird

I think all writing is an attempt to complicate and subvert the dominant narrative. Writing personalizes statistics. It puts a face and…

— Nick Laird

I'm always reading books, I'm always having encounters, I'm always taking trips. Whatever it is you come up with about how you…

— Nick Laird

If you grew up Protestant in Ireland, of course, at least in the twentieth century, there was always a contingent that would…

— Nick Laird

It seems to me that metaphors come down to a certain idea of interconnectedness - that everything relates to everything else. Metaphors…

— Nick Laird

When you're rereading or editing your book and you start to expect that this work is going to be reviewed, and you…

— Nick Laird

The whole point of writing poetry or fiction is that you get to agonize over whatever it is you want to say,…

— Nick Laird

Most of the poems I write go through forty versions and then stay in a file on my computer. I'm not very…

— Nick Laird

With an age difference comes a great gap in cultural references, and so on. It's not all about race and gender. It…

— Nick Laird

The whole process of having to put the thing into the world seems so antithetical to the act of writing. Poetry is…

— Nick Laird

New York allows you to go deeper into the person you want to be. You're able to explore whatever your specific interests…

— Nick Laird

Poetry is a way of being alone without feeling alone. It allows you to experience another mind, I suppose. And it does…

— Nick Laird

Poetry is perhaps the oldest art form. We can go back to an age-old idea of naming things, the Adamic impulse -…

— Nick Laird

I think all writing is political. All writing shows a preoccupation with something, whatever that thing might be, and by putting pen…

— Nick Laird

I think New York is working its way into my poems. It takes a while for a place to filter its way…

— Nick Laird

Publishing a book is a great thing, and I'm grateful, but it's also a horrible, exposing thing. Once you've published a book,…

— Nick Laird

Writing fiction, for me, is a more indirect form of self-exploration than writing verse. When I'm working on a novel I'm moving…

— Nick Laird

Nabokov quote: "I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, and I speak like a child."

— Nick Laird

A huge portion of Trump voters are incredibly pleased with how he's performing. They see what they want to see.

— Nick Laird

In fact, lots of good poetry doesn't work , so I don't mind a bit of mystification or difficulty.

— Nick Laird

Writing a poem is a more personal experience, I think, than writing prose. And perhaps reading a poem is a more personal…

— Nick Laird

What passes for love is imperfect knowledge. Not knowing, initially, allows faithlessness to dress up as its opposite; casts the inarticulate as…

— Nick Laird

New York is great for writers insofar as you can pay someone to bring you food, to take your washing out and…

— Nick Laird

Now that the most interesting matter of identity is not what place someone was born in, but what point in time they…

— Nick Laird

In terms of poetry, I worry about being far from the voice of my childhood, the rhythms of Ulster speech, and the…

— Nick Laird

I think all writing is about writing. All writing is a way of going out and exploring the world, of examining the…

— Nick Laird