Top 22 Philip Schultz Quotes

Suddenly, everyone wanted to talk to me, it seemed. And not about my poetry: it was my dyslexia they were most interested in.

I have to often read the same sentence over and over before I understand it. And I have to convince myself that what I’m reading is so enjoyable and so exciting and so good for me that it’s worth the effort.

I was well into middle age when one of my children, then in the second grade, was found to be dyslexic. I had never known the name for it, but I recognized immediately that the symptoms were also mine.

The word ‘novel’ carries, for me, a weight as ominous, all-consuming and unforgiving as any Job encountered.

I never doubted my talent. If talent was the circus, then I was its ringmaster and audience, applauding its every move.

I’m a painfully slow reader. And to this day, I mean, I love reading, and I’m very careful – very selective about what I read because I don’t read very fast and, therefore, not a great deal.

Repeating third grade at a new school, after having been asked to leave my old one for hitting kids who made fun of my perceived stupidity, I was placed in the ‘dummy class.’

I didn’t learn how to read until I was at the end of fifth grade and 11 years old and held back.

I don’t think I’ve worked with anyone where I haven’t seen some progress. Now sometimes you can’t take someone where they want to go, not all the way, and sometimes you stop, and they do it or don’t do it on their own thereafter.

I found many ways around my dyslexia, but I still have trouble transforming words into sounds. I have to memorize and rehearse before reading anything aloud to avoid embarrassing myself by mispronouncing words.

Art’s power of persuasion resides in the small personal details of one’s own story, and if it weren’t for my struggle with dyslexia, I doubt I’d ever have become a writer or known how to teach others to write.

There is a gap in my work from ’84 to 2002, 18 years where I stopped writing. I was working at fiction and other things and starting a school and getting married and starting a family, but I wasn’t writing poetry for the better part of 15 years.

I think I was 16 when I had the thought of maybe being a writer. And this is complicated, something I only now understand, because when I was young, having dyslexia and not knowing it made reading such an ordeal.

I was 17 when I decided to write stories as big as cathedrals, overflowing with the kind of memorable and audacious characters Walker Percy, Ernest Hemingway and Saul Bellow created.

I never feel more alone than when I’m traveling. Alone and, to some extent, helpless. The world expects a certain level of competence and can be merciless when this expectation is unmet.

Being a poet, the advantages of dyslexia are many, affording me sensitivity to the musical nuances of language and the ability to juggle complicated ideas and narratives simultaneously.

With my fiction, I focused on chapters and overall conceptions, while in poetry, I crawled along in the trenches of each sentence, examining every word for a sign of a deeper significance.

I eventually just imagined being a little boy who was quote unquote ‘normal’: who could learn like all the kids around me that I felt excluded from. And I imagined myself into one of these and into someone who could read.

What I read, I read thoroughly and retain almost all of it.

I write slowly, and I write many, many drafts. I probably have to work as hard as anyone, and maybe harder, to finish a poem. I often write a poem over years, because it takes me a long time to figure out what to say and how best to say it.

Most people try to avoid cliches. It’s my ambition in life to try to get ’em right!

I come from a family of Russian immigrant Jews who were all big storytellers, who would get together, and one would try to top the others’ stories, and stories would get bigger and bigger. And the lying aspect, the exaggeration, would get large.