“I hate that phrase "the real world." Why is an aircraft factory more real than a university? Is it? In universities I've had in my office ex-cons on parole, young people in tears racked with deep sexual problems, people recently… — Richard Hugo Copy Share Image
“there’s too many people in here. If I had my way, I’d have nothing but young chicks, the innocent ones you can teach something.” — Richard Hugo Copy Share Image
I will garden on the double run, my rhythm obvious in the ringing rakes, and trust in fate to keep me poor and kind… — Richard Hugo Copy Share Image
A poet is seldom hard up for advice. The worst part of it all is that sometimes the advice is coming from other poets,… — Richard Hugo Copy Share Image
...an imagined town is at least as real as an actual town. If it isn't, you may be in the wrong business. Our words come from obsessions we must submit to, whatever the social cost. It can be hard. It can be worse forty years from now if you feel you could have done it and didn't. It is narcissistic,… — Richard Hugo Copy Share
“…I’ve seen the world tell us with wars and real estate developments and bad politics and odd court decisions that our lives don’t matter. That may be because we are too many. Architecture and application form, modern life says that with so many of us we can best survive by ignoring identity and acting as it individual differences do not… — Richard Hugo Copy Share
A creative writing class may be one of the last places you can go where your life still matters. — Richard Hugo Copy Share Image
Maximum sentence length: seventeen words. Minimum:one No semicolons. Semicolons indicate relationships that only idiots need defined by punctuation. Besides, they are ugly. Make sure… — Richard Hugo Copy Share Image
A good creative-writing teacher can save a good writer a lot of time. — Richard Hugo Copy Share Image
“We won’t all disappear on a remote country road in the Monroe Valley, but like The Admiral and his wife we are all going into the dark. Some of us hope that before we do we have been honest enough to scream back at the fates. Or if we never did it ourselves, that someone, derelict or poet, did it… — Richard Hugo Copy Share
