In terms of poetry, I worry about being far from the voice of my childhood, the rhythms of Ulster speech, and the liveliness of its dialect. I know there is a vitality to New York talk, but living among people… — Nick Laird Copy Share Image
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 characters around and I'm thinking about plot and there's a lot of other things going on at the level of structure and story. With a poem, a single idea or line or emotion can sometimes be enough -… — Nick Laird Copy Share
What passes for love is imperfect knowledge. Not knowing, initially, allows faithlessness to dress up as its opposite; casts the inarticulate as enigmatic, the… — Nick Laird Copy Share Image
When you're rereading or editing your book and you start to expect that this work is going to be reviewed, and you can sort… — Nick Laird Copy Share Image
I think all writing is an attempt to complicate and subvert the dominant narrative. Writing personalizes statistics. It puts a face and a name… — Nick Laird Copy Share Image
That's what Samuel Johnson said: "Read over your compositions, and wherever you meet with a passage which you think particularly fine, strike it out." — Nick Laird Copy Share Image
You become a writer because you like to be alone in a room with your books. — Nick Laird Copy Share Image
With an age difference comes a great gap in cultural references, and so on. It's not all about race and gender. It interests me… — Nick Laird Copy Share Image
Most of the poems I write go through forty versions and then stay in a file on my computer. I'm not very good at… — Nick Laird Copy Share Image
Poetry is a way of being alone without feeling alone. It allows you to experience another mind, I suppose. And it does that more… — Nick Laird Copy Share Image
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, you never… — Nick Laird Copy Share Image
Nabokov quote: "I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, and I speak like a child." — Nick Laird Copy Share Image
