A Quote by David Berman

Piece by piece I sent my first book of poems to American Poetry Review and was rejected one by one.

David Berman

Quote Topics

American American Poetry Book First Piece Poems Poetry Rejected Review Sent

Quote Author

David Berman
American - Musician
January 4, 1967 - August 7, 2019

I started work on my first French history book in 1969; on 'Socialism in Provence' in 1974; and on the essays in Marxism and the French Left in 1978. Conversely, my first non-academic publication, a review in the 'TLS', did not come until the late 1980s, and it was not until 1993 that I published my first piece in the 'New York Review.'

Tony Judt

I thought of the structure as musical. The first piece, for instance, contains the names/subject matter of every person to come in the book. Like a piece of music with themes, etc.

Hilton Als

Making your bed could be a piece of art, and writing a book could be a piece of art. You could also write a book that's not a piece of art, but that is a book, and it could be a book that was written by an artist.

Matthew Brannon

The writer's no different. When he's rejected, that paper is rejected, in a sense, a sizeable fragment of the writer is rejected as well. It's a piece of himself that's being turned down.

Rod Serling

Hard is trying to rebuild yourself, piece by piece, with no instruction book, and no clue as to where all the important bits are supposed to go.

Nick Hornby

It was missing a piece. And it was not happy. So it set off in search of its missing piece. And as it rolled it sang this song - "Oh I'm lookin' for my missin' piece I'm lookin' for my missin' piece Hi-dee-ho, here I go, Lookin' for my missin' piece.

Shel Silverstein

Each piece of jewellery tells a story of my life. Picking one particular piece as a favorite would be like taking a chapter out of a book.

Erin Wasson

It's very important to understand that the 'Talk' piece was not an excerpt, it was an adaptation, which means I compressed different parts of the book and made a new piece.

David Brock

I worked with John Maybury on The Jacket and I think he's an extraordinary film-maker. I read the first drafts of this piece when I was working on The Jacket, and we'd so fallen in love with him that we thought he was the only person that should direct this! We wrote poems for him, we sent him champagne and cakes. Four years later he finally read it.

Keira Knightley

The first 2 weeks, they didn't learn the piece - they went through the process of how the piece was made.

Siobhan Davies

If you can find two poems in a book, it could be a pretty good book for you. You know, two poems you really like. There are some poets who are fairly big names in contemporary poetry and who write a book and I might like three or four poems in the book, but the rest of them don't appeal to me personally; but I think that's the way it really ought to be. I think it's really a rare thing to like everything that somebody has written.

Ted Kooser

People ask what was the first piece of music I wrote. There was no first piece.

Richard Rodney Bennett

When Emily Dickinson's poems were published in the 1890s, they were a best-seller; the first book of her poems went through eleven editions of a print run of about 400. So the first print run out of Boston for a first book of poems was 400 for a country that had fifty million people in it. Now a first print run for a first book is maybe 2,000? So that's a five-time increase in the expectation of readership. Probably the audience is almost exactly the same size as it was in 1900, if you just took that one example.

Robert Hass

The dark night was the first book of poetry and the constellations were the poems.

Chet Raymo

There's no reason to keep a piece of furniture in your house that is so sacred and rare that you can't put your feet up on it and a dog can't jump up on it. Likewise, a book that sits on a shelf like a piece of porcelain, only to be admired, never to be read again, is a dead book.