Quotes by Nick Laird - Page 1 | QuoteForever

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There is such a shelter in each other.
Nick Laird / Novelist
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You become a writer because you like to be alone in a room with your books.
Nick Laird / Novelist
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Cargo cults fascinate me partly because Christianity itself is in many ways a cargo cult.
Nick Laird / Novelist
Christianity
Cult
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I don't think there's any law where you have to read a poem and immediately understand it.
Nick Laird / Novelist
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She was privileged enough to feel at home anywhere, and to equate squalor with authenticity.
Nick Laird / Novelist
Home
Authenticity
Enough
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In fact, lots of good poetry doesn't work , so I don't mind a bit of mystification or difficulty.
Nick Laird / Novelist
Difficulty
Mind
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Nabokov quote: "I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, and I speak like a child."
Nick Laird / Novelist
Children
Thinking
Writing
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A huge portion of Trump voters are incredibly pleased with how he's performing. They see what they want to see.
Nick Laird / Novelist
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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 / Novelist
Book
Reason
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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 committee.
Nick Laird / Novelist
Horse
Team
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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 / Novelist
Composition
Over You
Thinking
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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 of tell which line is going to show up in reviews.
Nick Laird / Novelist
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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 / Novelist
Reading
Thinking
Writing
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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 / Novelist
Book
Reading
Reading Books
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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 on a number. I suppose in that sense it's always political.
Nick Laird / Novelist
Political
Thinking
Writing
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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 selfish as forgetful, the angry as impassioned.
Nick Laird / Novelist
Love Is
Opposites
Selfish
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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 / Novelist
Perfect
Writing
Writing Poetry
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It seems to me that metaphors come down to a certain idea of interconnectedness - that everything relates to everything else. Metaphors don't believe in autonomy. And in the end, perhaps that idea of interconnectedness is a moral position.
Nick Laird / Novelist
Believe
Metaphor
Moral
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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 / Novelist
Ireland
Never Quit
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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 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 / Novelist
Age
Gender
Stranger
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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 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 / Novelist
Feelings
Interesting
Writing
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New York is great for writers insofar as you can pay someone to bring you food, to take your washing out and bring it back clean. It enables you. Writers always feel guilty when they're doing anything but writing, and New York allows you to really write all the time if you want to - though my kids put a limit on it.
Nick Laird / Novelist
Kids
Guilty
Writing
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In terms of poetry, I worry about being far from the voice of my childhood, the rhythms of Ulster speech, and the liveliness of its dialect. I know there is a vitality to New York talk, but living among people of different cultures does mean you're forced to homogenize and lose the interesting words and phrases in order to be understood.
Nick Laird / Novelist
Interesting
Mean
People
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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 / Novelist
Interest
Internet
Reading
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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 / Novelist
Literature
Reading
Thinking
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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 / Novelist
Memories
Thinking
Writing
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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 / Novelist
Book
Thinking
Writing
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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 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 / Novelist
Art
Thinking
Writing
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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 / Novelist
Thinking
World
Writing
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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 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 / Novelist
Book
Grateful
Writing
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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 / Novelist
Age
Army
Interesting
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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 / Novelist
Art
Blessing
Powerful
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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 / Novelist
Character
Moving
Writing
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