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Books Quote by Nick Laird

“That's what Samuel Johnson said: "Read over your compositions, and…” quote by Nick Laird — Download Open 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."”

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Books Composition Over you Samuel Johnson Thinking

More by Nick Laird

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…

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What passes for love is imperfect knowledge. Not knowing, initially, allows faithlessness to dress up as its opposite; casts the inarticulate as enigmatic, the…

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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…

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I think all writing is an attempt to complicate and subvert the dominant narrative. Writing personalizes statistics. It puts a face and a name…

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You become a writer because you like to be alone in a room with your books.

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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…

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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…

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Poetry is a way of being alone without feeling alone. It allows you to experience another mind, I suppose. And it does that more…

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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…

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There is such a shelter in each other.

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Nabokov quote: "I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, and I speak like a child."

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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…

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Explore all 37 Nick Laird quotes

More Books quotes

I think a new world will arise out of the religious mists when we approach our Bible with the idea that it is not…

Aiden Wilson Tozer

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If I had a dollar for every time I couldn’t sleep, I could buy a billion locks and finally read a book in peace.

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If what I write is literature, I guess you'd better emphasize the 'litter.'

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My sentences got sharper and my stories more efficient, and I gradually learned to imagine the reader more clearly and to empathize with that…

Karen Thompson Walker

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Young men, especially in America, write to me and ask me to recommend “a course of reading.” Distrust a course of reading! People who…

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“Within the pages of books, I've journeyed to Mandalay, the Milky Way and Santa Fe, without once having to leave my armchair.”

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The Rosary is the book of the blind.

Fulton J. Sheen

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“Tacitus did not write a most dangerous book. His readers made it so.”

Christopher K. Krebs

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“Take some books and read; that’s an immense help; and books are always good company if you have the right sort.”

Louisa May Alcott

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Reader, if you are gifted with nerves like mine, aspire to any character but that of a wit.

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I have many who keep me going, I am very fortunate in this sense. There is nothing like a child who knows more about…

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I think books in which people are really happy and things are going well are probably the most challenging novels there are to write,…

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