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… — Nick Laird Character 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… — Nick Laird Angry 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… — Nick Laird Book 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… — Nick Laird Political 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… — Nick Laird Books Copy Share Image
You become a writer because you like to be alone in a room with your books. — Nick Laird Book 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… — Nick Laird Age 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… — Nick Laird Computer 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… — Nick Laird Art 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,… — Nick Laird Book Copy Share Image
Nabokov quote: "I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, and I speak like a child." — Nick Laird Books 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… — Nick Laird Horse 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… — Nick Laird Book 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… — Nick Laird Book Copy Share Image
New York is great for writers insofar as you can pay someone to bring you food, to take your washing out and… — Nick Laird Guilty Copy Share Image
I think all writing is political. All writing shows a preoccupation with something, whatever that thing might be, and by putting pen… — Nick Laird Emotion Copy Share Image
Cargo cults fascinate me partly because Christianity itself is in many ways a cargo cult. — Nick Laird Christianity Copy Share Image
In fact, lots of good poetry doesn't work , so I don't mind a bit of mystification or difficulty. — Nick Laird Difficulty Copy Share Image
“He unzipped his hooded top and took it off, and wished emotions were like clothes, that he could remove them, fold them,… — Nick Laird Copy Share Image
In terms of poetry, I worry about being far from the voice of my childhood, the rhythms of Ulster speech, and the… — Nick Laird Childhood Copy Share Image
Now that the most interesting matter of identity is not what place someone was born in, but what point in time they… — Nick Laird Age Copy Share Image
She was privileged enough to feel at home anywhere, and to equate squalor with authenticity. — Nick Laird Authenticity Copy Share Image
The whole point of writing poetry or fiction is that you get to agonize over whatever it is you want to say,… — Nick Laird Perfect Copy Share Image
If you grew up Protestant in Ireland, of course, at least in the twentieth century, there was always a contingent that would… — Nick Laird Ireland Copy Share Image
