Literary Birthday – 26 October – Andrew Motion

Happy Birthday, Andrew Motion, born 26 October 1952.

Five Quotes

1. Poems are a hotline to our hearts, and we forget this emotional power at our peril.
2. I’m also a great believer in the dream life; that while we’re asleep, a deep subconscious connection is made about our profoundest fears, hopes, loves, losses, dreads, and desires.
3. I’ve always thought that the balance between the side of my mind that knows what it is doing and the side that really hasn’t got a clue has to be carefully maintained because if you write too knowingly then you get chilly, and if you write too unknowingly you write bollocks that nobody else can understand.
4. If I were to die thinking that I’d written three poems that people might read after me, I would feel that I hadn’t lived in vain. Great poets might expect the whole body of their work, but most of us – well, I would settle for a handful.
5. In a fragile environment, we need to be aware of ourselves as members of a uniquely powerful species living among other species who are quite as interesting as we are but vulnerable to us because we are cleverer in more destructive ways.

Read: Andrew Motion’s 10 Rules For Writers

Sir Andrew Motion is an English poet and author. He was Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom from 1999 to 2009. His works include Keats, Silver, and The New World.

Source for Writing Tips: Guardian

Image

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Andrew_Motion,_April_2009.jpg

Peter-Ashley Jackson, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

 by Amanda Patterson

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