Quotes by George Murray

• With 'Carousel' I had an idea and it all came out quickly.
• I was writing notes, but not composing poems. The Hunter began to develop out of this fragmented process.
• I'm not interested in being easy anymore. Readable, yes. Easy, no.
• I've often entertained paranoid suspicions about my fridge and what it's been doing to my poetry when I'm not looking, but I never even considered that my fan was thinking about me.
• In fact, in some ways, I actually feel much more confident about the quality of Carousel than I do about The Cottage Builder's Letter: probably because of its cohesive nature.
• In my opinion, Al Moritz may be the best poet of his generation in Canada.
• My self-editing process is intense.
• The poetry community here has been extraordinarily welcoming.
• The whole competition thing disturbs me. Not that I wasn't a part of it when I first started.
• Well, we all start thinking we're going to be Romantic rock stars, but then reality hits and you realize no one reads you but other poets.
• I wanted to rock back and forth between myth and distant futures, yesterday, today, and tomorrow. It felt a bit like prophecy and a bit like storytelling.
• It's a bit of a crapshoot out there with young writers right now anyway.
• Then I discovered I loved writing poetry more than fiction.
• I am still interested in the long or serial poem, but have written a few smaller things. I may start sending to journals again in a year or so... that's about it.
• Even the people who have had success and made money writing these books of fiction seem to feel the need to pretend it's no big deal, or part of a natural progression from poetry to fiction, but often it's really just about the money, the perceived prestige.
• I think, for me, humour needs to be used like a strong spice - sparingly.
• I am certainly suffering from a modicum of performance anxiety.
• I do try to let what is obviously unintended yet naturally good stay in.
• New York was breaking my concentration and disintegrating my thoughts.
• I don't think there's anything wrong with someone having to read a poem twice. Or even a book.
• I feel as though I've fooled the world into thinking I'm an adult and now they're letting me procreate.
• I guess there is also an element of deliberate change involved. Each of my books has been, at least from my point of view, radically different from the last.
• I no longer feel pressure to produce fiction.
• Humour is a fine line to walk in poetry, as in fiction. I just think it's harder to write. It's harder to keep the respect of the reader too.
• I still write the occasional short story, and poked at a novel once, but it's just not what I want to do.
• I suppress the vast majority of what I write.
• I think the main influence has been living in New York City. Aside from all the crap around 9/11, I find it very demanding to think amid all the noise and visual pollution.
• A sequence works in a way a collection never can.