Alison Hawthorne Deming Quotes About Writing

Quotes about: Writing

• I think I started writing as a young person because I felt a lot of psychic confusion and emotional confusion, and writing was a way to sort it out. You know, to externalize it, sort it out, put it down, look at it, and hopefully it would become clearer.

  Alison Hawthorne Deming

  Writing, Emotional, Psychics

  Nashville Review Interview, as.vanderbilt.edu. December 1, 2012.

• What I like about teaching is the discipline of finding words to unpack the artistic process. And I admire the drive in students who want to write, the mystery of how artistic talent unfolds.

  Alison Hawthorne Deming

  Teaching, Writing, Discipline

  Interview with Simmons B. Buntin, www.terrain.org. September 22, 2010.

• I'm always writing towards a discovery. When I'm writing poems in particular, I'm often writing because a few images coalesced in my mind and I thought, "I wonder why these images are abrading against each other. I wonder what happens if put them in a poem and explore them." I'm trying to learn something every time I write a poem.

  Alison Hawthorne Deming

  Writing, Discovery, Mind

  Nashville Review Interview, as.vanderbilt.edu. December 1, 2012.

• I had wanted for so many years to feel that writing really was at the center of my life, not something I did in my spare time. So the writing and teaching feel in some way to be one thing - the personal engagement and the social engagement good partners.

  Alison Hawthorne Deming

  Teaching, Writing, Years

  Interview with Simmons B. Buntin, www.terrain.org. September 22, 2010.

• I'm trying to learn something about making a balance between the inner life and the outer life. I wouldn't write if I didn't need to be making those discoveries, if I didn't feel the perpetual ignorance of being a human being.

  Alison Hawthorne Deming

  Writing, Ignorance, Discovery

  Nashville Review Interview, as.vanderbilt.edu. December 1, 2012.

• I like to joke that I started writing long poems out the anxiety over ending and starting poems. It just seemed easier to keep going.

  Alison Hawthorne Deming

  Writing, Long, Anxiety

  Interview with Simmons B. Buntin, www.terrain.org. September 22, 2010.

• A lot of times students will come up to me and say, "Well, I can't write because I don't know what I think about such-and-such." And I say, "That's why you have to write." You don't wait until you know, because then who cares - it's static.

  Alison Hawthorne Deming

  Writing, Thinking, Waiting

  Nashville Review Interview, as.vanderbilt.edu. December 1, 2012.

• I had real concerns about the relationship between nature and culture and places I wanted to write about... I thought, well, maybe I should try prose. It was a real struggle to begin because, first of all, there were so many words on the page - it was terrifying... Beginning was awful.

  Alison Hawthorne Deming

  Real, Struggle, Writing

  Nashville Review Interview, as.vanderbilt.edu. December 1, 2012.

• I'm interested in thinking about how are we contributing to the culture, what we can write that might help us deepen the culture, make us more reflective, make us more empathetic, make us feel our connectedness in other ways.

  Alison Hawthorne Deming

  Writing, Thinking, Culture

  Nashville Review Interview, as.vanderbilt.edu. December 1, 2012.

• Sometimes it gets talked about as if life is all about the individual, and I don't think it is. I'm really interested in what writing can contribute to a kind of cultural intelligence.

  Alison Hawthorne Deming

  Writing, Thinking, Kind

• When we're writing anything, we're bearing witness to the time we live in and how it's different from any other time in history.

  Alison Hawthorne Deming

  Writing, Different, Bearing Witness

  Interview with Christopher Adamson, as.vanderbilt.edu. December 1, 2012.

• I don't want people to write programmatic environmental poems, but I think sustainability should become deeply a part of the consciousness of poetry - an impulse toward compassion, empathy, and social justice.

  Alison Hawthorne Deming

  Writing, Thinking, Compassion

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