Marilyn Hacker Quotes - Page 2

I try to write everyday. I do that much better over here than when I'm teaching. I always rewrite, usually fairly close-on which is to say first draft, then put it aside for 24 hours then more drafts.

i'm alternatingly brilliant and witless-and sleepless: bed is just a swamp to roll in.

I worked at all kinds of jobs, mostly commercial editing.

Clearly, once the student is no longer a student the possibilities of relationship are enlarged.

Given the devaluation of literature and of the study of foreign languages per se in the United States, as well as the preponderance of theory over text in graduate literature studies, creative writing programs keep literature courses populated.

You are almost not free, if you are teaching a group of graduate students, to become friends with one of them. I don't mean anything erotically charged, just a friendship.

As a teacher you are more or less obliged to pay the same amount of attention to everything. That can wear you down.

We sometimes received - and I would read - 200 manuscripts a week. Some of them were wonderful, some were terrible; most were mediocre. It was like the gifts of the good and bad fairies.

I don't think it's by accident that I was first attracted to translating two French women poets.

Community means people spending time together here, and I don't think there's really that.

The phenomenon of university creative writing programs doesn't exist in France. The whole idea is regarded as a novelty, or an oddity.

The pull between sound and syntax creates a kind of musical tension in the language that interests me.

I don't know whether a poem has be there to help to develop something. I think it's there for itself, for what the reader finds in it.

Paris is a wonderful city. I can't say I belong to an especially anglophone community.

I lived in the studio apartment that I bought for four years before I bought it in 1989, so I was already in it. I began living there in 1985, so I've had the same address and phone number since then.

I think there is something about coming to a city to work that puts you in touch with it in a different way.

When you translate poetry in particular, you're obliged to look at how the writer with whom you're working puts together words, sentences, phrases, the triple tension between the line of verse, the syntax and the sentence.