Latest Nick Laird Quotes from Interviews

Quotes about:

• 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

  Reading, Thinking, Literature

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• 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

  Reading, Internet, Interest

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• 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

  Writing, Thinking, World

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• 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

  Grateful, Book, Writing

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• 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

  Memories, Writing, Thinking

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• 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

  Writing, Thinking, Political

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• Now that the most interesting matter of identity is not what place someone was born in, but what point in time they are from - where they sit in relation to time. Age has become much more divisive than place. With the Internet and globalization, a twenty-year-old in New York has far more cultural references in common with a twenty-year-old in Nebraska than they do with a thirty-year-old who lives next door. National identity is what they trick you with when they want your feet in their army boots or your taxes in their bailouts.

  Nick Laird

  Army, Interesting, Age

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• 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 that, as you get older, your younger self becomes a stranger to you. A split occurs within yourself. But maybe we're all always strangers to ourselves.

  Nick Laird

  Age, Stranger, Gender

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• 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 sending stuff out or feeling that something is ready to send out and I never have been. Part of the problem is that as soon as a poem is finished, it stops being all that interesting to me.

  Nick Laird

  Writing, Interesting, Feelings

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• If you grew up Protestant in Ireland, of course, at least in the twentieth century, there was always a contingent that would never really consider you Irish. Meanwhile in Britain you'd
  never quite be considered British. You fell into a gap in the definitions.

  Nick Laird

  Never Quit, Ireland

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• Writing a poem is a more personal experience, I think, than writing prose. And perhaps reading a poem is a more personal experience than reading prose, though that's harder to say.

  Nick Laird

  Reading, Writing, Thinking

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• 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 and I'm thinking about plot and there's a lot of other things going on at the level of structure and story. With a poem, a single idea or line or emotion can sometimes be enough - there's often a sense, in the best poems, of capturing a single instant. Perhaps poems differ from prose in the degree of solace they can offer - by speaking so personally, so directly, about shared experience. A few lines of poetry can provide comfort.

  Nick Laird

  Moving, Writing, Character

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• Poetry is a way of being alone without feeling alone. It allows you to experience another mind, I suppose. And it does that more fully than other art forms, I think. It doesn't simply describe an experience, or a feeling, or a moment: it evokes it through, say, rhythm or tone or diction or metaphor. It creates a mood. A poem communicates before it is understood; it's not a fully paraphrasable form, which distinguishes it from other forms of writing.

  Nick Laird

  Art, Writing, Thinking

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• 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 it, to capture it. A poem is still a kind of spell, an incantation. Historically, a poem also invoked: it was a blessing, or a curse, or a charm. It had a motile power, was able to summon something into being. A poem is a special kind of speech-act. In a good poem there's the trance-like effect of language in its most concentrated, naked form.

  Nick Laird

  Art, Powerful, Blessing

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• 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, that's equally true for all the books you didn't start.

  Nick Laird

  Book, Reading, Reading Books

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• The reason that the book exists is because there was a gap in you. You wrote the book to fulfill that gap in some way.

  Nick Laird

  Book, Reason

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• The whole point of writing poetry or fiction is that you get to agonize over whatever it is you want to say, and you finally say it, and you get it as perfect as you can make it. Then you're forced to babble freestyle.

  Nick Laird

  Writing, Perfect, Writing Poetry

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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

  Nick Laird

  Book

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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

  Nick Laird

  Children, Writing, Thinking

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• 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

  Book, Writing, Thinking

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• 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

  Thinking, Over You, Composition

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• 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

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• I don't think there's any law where you have to read a poem and immediately understand it.

  Nick Laird

  Thinking

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• In fact, lots of good poetry doesn't work , so I don't mind a bit of mystification or difficulty.

  Nick Laird

  Mind, Difficulty

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• Cargo cults fascinate me partly because Christianity itself is in many ways a cargo cult.

  Nick Laird

  Christianity, Cult

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com