quotes from classic

There is no dispute that judges need a pay raise.

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If we understand the past, we are more likely to recognise what is happening around us.

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When you are young you don't always realise how full of doubts everybody is.

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However, I began to submit poems to British magazines, and some were accepted. It was a great moment to see my first poems published. It felt like entering a tradition.

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As individuals, we are shaped by story from the time of birth; we are formed by what we are told by our parents, our teachers, our intimates.

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I enjoy research; in fact research is so engaging that it would be easy to go on for years, and never write the novel at all.

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I have learned so much from working with other poets, travelling and reading with them, spending days discussing poems in progress. There is the sense that we are all, as writers, part of something which is more powerful than any of us.

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The poets whom I knew then were all men and all seemed dauntingly sure of themselves - although I am sure that really they were as uncertain as I was.

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I could start with Mandelstam, who was a huge influence on my early writing.

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My first collection of poems was published by Bloodaxe Books, which was then a very new imprint.

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I didn't choose Russia but Russia chose me. I had been fascinated from an early age by the culture, the language, the literature and the history to the place.

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I hope that readers will tear through my books because they can't stop themselves - and then, maybe, read them again and find new things there.

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I can remember being in my pram: children stayed in their prams much longer then than they do now. A big bouncy pram with black covers and a hood with metal clips that could trap your fingers. I was looking up at my sister who was sitting on the pram seat, with her back to me.

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I concentrate on the lives of individuals whom the reader comes to know and feel with intimately.

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A novel, in the end, is a container, a shape which you are trying to pour your story into.

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Those who try to obliterate the past are injuring the present.

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The language has got to be fully alive - I can't bear dull, flaccid writing myself and I don't see why any reader should put up with it.

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To try to expunge an individual's history is a terrible violation.

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I was always influenced by language.

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Poets go through a very tough apprenticeship in the use of words.

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