Poetry is perhaps the oldest art form. We can go back to an age-old idea of naming things, the Adamic impulse - to give something a name has always been an immensely powerful thing. To name something is to own… — 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… — 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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
Nabokov quote: "I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, and I speak like a child." — Nick Laird Copy Share
There used to be one writer rather than a team of writers. It's the old line about a camel being a horse designed by… — Nick Laird Copy Share
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 got started,… — Nick Laird Copy Share
The whole process of having to put the thing into the world seems so antithetical to the act of writing. Poetry is slightly easier,… — Nick Laird Copy Share
