Blake Morrison Quotes & Sayings

Editing might be a bloody trade. But knives aren't the exclusive property of butchers. Surgeons use them too. — Blake Morrison

The selective memory isn't selective enough. — Blake Morrison

A hope of something beyond our place and time. This is what books - the best books - give us: a lifeline, a reason to believe, a way to breathe more freely. — Blake Morrison

At times of crisis or distress, it's poems that people turn to. (Poetry) still has a power to speak to people's feelings, maybe in a way that fiction, because it works in a longer way, can't. There's a little bit of your brain that mourns and grieves that you're not writing poetry, but actually as long as I'm writing something, I'm happy. — Blake Morrison

You can possess a book without really owning it, though. Beyond ownership in a commercial or legal sense, there's ownership of an emotional or metaphysical kind - when a book speaks so powerfully to us that we feel it's ours exclusively: that it exists just tor us. People we meet sometimes have this effect too; they look into our eyes, and speak in a hushed, intimate voice, and make us feel we're uniquely important to them - before going on to do the same to someone else. In life, we call these people flirts. The best books are flirtatious, too, since they seem to be ours alone when in reality they're anyone's. — Blake Morrison