New York allows you to go deeper into the person you want to be. You're able to explore whatever your specific interests might be. You can eat good Japanese food if you want to eat good Japanese food. You can… — 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 fully than other art forms, I think. It doesn't simply describe an experience, or a feeling, or a moment: it evokes it through, say, rhythm or tone or diction or metaphor. It creates a mood. A… — Nick Laird Copy Share
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 write quite as freely again. You're aware, from that point onward, of the kinds of things critics might say about it. You're aware of the kinds of things your publishers might like and dislike about it.… — Nick Laird Copy Share
Nabokov quote: "I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, and I speak like a child." — Nick Laird Copy Share Image
