There is such a shelter in each other. Nick Laird More Quotes by Nick Laird More Quotes From Nick Laird In fact, lots of good poetry doesn't work , so I don't mind a bit of mystification or difficulty. Nick Laird difficultymind 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 compositionover-youthinking 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 go and see your favorite author reading, and you can still listen to Radio Ulster on the internet as you have your breakfast. I love that. Nick Laird internetinterestreading You become a writer because you like to be alone in a room with your books. Nick Laird book The whole process of having to put the thing into the world seems so antithetical to the act of writing. Poetry is slightly easier, because there's less money and fewer people involved. You just let a book of poems trickle out in the world, and it finds its own people. Novels are much harder, and you don't think you should have to do some of the things you're made to do. Nick Laird writingbookthinking 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 of tell which line is going to show up in reviews. Nick Laird book A huge portion of Trump voters are incredibly pleased with how he's performing. They see what they want to see. Nick Laird performing I think all writing is an attempt to complicate and subvert the dominant narrative. Writing personalizes statistics. It puts a face and a name on a number. I suppose in that sense it's always political. Nick Laird politicalwritingthinking I think all writing is about writing. All writing is a way of going out and exploring the world, of examining the way we live, and therefore any words you put down on the page about life will, at some level, also be words about words. It's still amazing, though, how many poems can be read as being analogous to the act of writing a poem. "Go to hell, go into detail, go for the throat" is certainly about writing, but it's also hopefully about a way of living. Nick Laird writingworldthinking 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. You're half-aware of marketing strategies - of all the stuff around the book. Whereas with your very first piece of fiction, if you're lucky, those things barely occur to you at all. Nick Laird gratefulwritingbook I think New York is working its way into my poems. It takes a while for a place to filter its way onto the page, but I've been reading more and more American poetry and I certainly feel it as quite a freeing force. Coming from the formally ordered tradition of poetry in Ireland, I find the expansiveness of American literature freeing in some sense. Nick Laird readingliteraturethinking I think all writing is political. All writing shows a preoccupation with something, whatever that thing might be, and by putting pen to paper you are establishing a hierarchy of some sort - this emotion over that emotion, this memory over that memory, this thought over another. And isn't that process of establishing a hierarchy on the page a kind of political act? Nick Laird writingmemoriesthinking
