A Quote by Claire Tomalin

People who attack biography choose as their models vulgar and offensive biography. You could equally attack novels or poems by choosing bad poems or novels.

Claire Tomalin

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Attack Bad Biography Choose Choosing Could Equally Models Novels Offensive People Poems Vulgar

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Claire Tomalin
English - Author
Born: June 20, 1933

I started to write my own stories, like small novels, and those novels became poems, and after poems, they became lyrics, and song came from that.

Dawn Richard

I live in Harlem, New York City. I am unmarried. I like 'Tristan,' goat's milk, short novels, lyric poems, heat, simple folk, boats and bullfights; I dislike 'Aida,' parsnips, long novels, narrative poems, cold, pretentious folk, buses and bridges.

Langston Hughes

Poems are taught as though the poet has put a secret key in his words and it is the reader's job to find it. Poems are not mystery novels.

Natalie Goldberg

Biography always has fulfiled this role. Robinson Crusoe is a biography, as is Tom Jones. You can go through the whole range of the novel, and you will find it is biography. The only difference between one example and the other is that sometimes it's a partial biography and sometimes it's a total biography. Clarissa, for example, is a partial biography of Clarissa and a partial biography of Lovelace. In other words, it doesn't follow Lovelace from when he is in the cradle, though it takes him to the grave.

William Golding

What I like about prose poems is that they seem to make people uncomfortable - people want to define them, justify them, attack them. Prose poems are natural fence-sitters.

Matthea Harvey

Many people have said to me, "What a pity you had such a big family to raise." "Think of the novels and the short stories and the poems you never had time to write because of that." And I looked at my children and I said, "These are my poems, these are my stories."

Olga Masters

Poems, novels - these things belong to the nation, to the culture, and the people.

Joseph Brodsky

It's a feature of our age that if you write a work of fiction, everyone assumes that the people and events in it are disguised biography — but if you write your biography, it's equally assumed you're lying your head off.

Margaret Atwood

What if this young woman, who writes such bad poems, in competition with her husband, whose poems are equally bad, should stretch her remarkably long and well-made legs out before you, so that her skirt slips up to the tops of her stockings?

Gilbert Sorrentino

There are many poets that use as my models. In my first book of poems, I had several for the "Sleepwalkers," I had several poems that were apprentice poems like this in which I take a walk with a poet who is no longer alive.

Edward Hirsch

Poetry can only be made out of other poems; novels out of other novels.

Northrop Frye

As it can be maintained that all the great advances have come from men under forty, so the history of the world shows that a very large proportion of the evils may be traced to the sexagenarians, nearly all the great mistakes politically and socially, all of the worst poems, most of the bad pictures, a majority of the bad novels and not a few of the bad sermons and speeches.

William Osler

May we now all rise and sing the eternal school hymn: "Attack. Attack. Attack Attack Attack!"

Danny Baker

I suppose I'm proudest of my novels for what's imagined in them. I think the world of my imagination is a richer and more interesting place than my personal biography.

John Irving

I think there's a false division people sometimes make in describing literary novels, where there are people who write systems novels, or novels of ideas, and there are people who write about emotional things in which the movement is character driven. But no good novels are divisible in that way.

Dana Spiotta

The Court explained the problem with his writings (People v. Ruggles. 1811.): an attack on Jesus Christ was an attack on Christianity; and an attack on Christianity was an attack on the foundation of the country; therefore, an attack on Jesus Christ was equivalent to an attack on the country!

David Barton

A Quote by Claire Tomalin

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