New York is great for writers insofar as you can pay someone to bring you food, to take your washing out and bring it back clean. It enables you. Writers always feel guilty when they're doing anything but writing, and… — 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 Image
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
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 Image
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 Image
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 Image
