Home
Authors
Tags
App
Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App
" I was a professor for 20 years, 12 of those at Emory University. "
Kevin Young
Those
University
Professor
Related Quotes:
" I think that I try really hard to think about how we deceive ourselves, and we let ourselves be deceived. "
Kevin Young
Deceive
Hard
Think
" What a poem can do is provide you this intimate eye that, for the length of a poem and hopefully a little bit after, can provide testimony or a point of view. "
Kevin Young
You
Eye
Point Of View
" When I'm in full-on writing mode and have the day, I try to get in my office around 10 A.M. and stop once 'Judge Judy' comes on at 4, when I quit and come down. Sometimes, I leave her on while I edit - if she can make the tough calls, then so can I. "
Kevin Young
Tough
Day
Judge
" There's always been really interesting, diverse black voices talking and arguing and counterpointing. "
Kevin Young
Always
Talking
Interesting
" I remember in the '80s, people would literally have arguments over the best guitarist. "
Kevin Young
Remember
People
Best
" Even Toni Morrison claiming Bill Clinton as 'black' could not prepare us for the election of America's first undeniably black president, Barack Obama. "
Kevin Young
Prepare
First
Election
" The hoax is the very absence of truth, which usually means art is absent, too - hoaxes regularly substitute claims of reality for imagination, facts for form, acting as if artifice is the antithesis of art. "
Kevin Young
Art
Reality
Imagination
" In many ways, I feel like the form carries so much of the weight in a poem, obviously. But I think we sometimes forget that. "
Kevin Young
Feel
Forget
Like
" There is, of course, no larger mass hysteria in American history than the epidemic of racism. "
Kevin Young
History
Hysteria
Racism
" I try to have a lot of influences, which is to say not to have one specific influence too strongly; that can end up badly. "
Kevin Young
Influence
End
Up
" Blackface remains exoticist and offensive as a practice, not just because of its long tradition of being used to mock black selfhood, sexuality, and speech but because of its assertion that black people are merely white people sullied by dark skin. "
Kevin Young
Dark
People
Long
" I try to read as a reader and also read as a writer. I mean, they're not so different. "
Kevin Young
Also
Mean
Writer
" To me, poetry is spoken - not exclusively, but there's a mix of languages in it. That's what I liked about 'For the Confederate Dead;' it has many different tones to it. "
Kevin Young
Poetry
Me
Different
" One of the most troubling things about the term 'fake news' is that it has become a force field against accusations you don't like. "
Kevin Young
Against
Become
News
" In African-American culture, there's often a family historian, someone who does the genealogy or keeps the family Bible. I became aware that might be one role the poet has. "
Kevin Young
Someone
Bible
Culture
" That sense of mystery, but also of revelation, is what I turn to poems for. They're able to embody experience. We need more and more of that. "
Kevin Young
Experience
Turn
Need
" Rereading 'To Kill a Mockingbird,' I was struck by what I had forgotten of the book: in a manner of pages, we encounter shame, history, ruin, conflicting stories, and wounds badly healed; in short, the South. "
Kevin Young
History
Forgotten
Shame
" It's hard to describe one's own alchemy that makes one into a writer, but I definitely think American language is so interesting, and specifically Southern language and black Southern language; it's hard to separate Southern language from black language. "
Kevin Young
American
Own
Language
" Poets often are dealing with history and are thinking about the way history moves across us, and we move in it. "
Kevin Young
Us
History
About
" I didn't know any poets growing up in Kansas. "
Kevin Young
Kansas
Know
Up
" I think I go with the Duke Ellington view on music. He said, 'There's two kinds of music - there's good music, and then there's the other kind.' "
Kevin Young
Good
Kind
Music
" It took a while for anyone to want to publish 'To Repel Ghosts.' I thought people would want to publish a three-hundred-and-fifty-page book about a dead painter, but they didn't. "
Kevin Young
People
Want
Book
" Great music - say jazz - has that inventive, improvisational quality that tells us something about life. "
Kevin Young
Jazz
Life
Music
" Forget reparations - we need to rescue aspects of black culture abandoned even by black folks, whether it is the blues or home cookin' or broader forms of not just survival but triumph. "
Kevin Young
Triumph
Home
Culture
" I write about what hoaxers do, but I also want us to think about what believers do. Why do we want to believe a story like James Frey's 'A Million Little Pieces?' Why did we want to believe that Lance Armstrong really did all these things that, looking back, seemed impossible? "
Kevin Young
Looking
Looking Back
Think
" I'm not a historian. I know historians. I've worked with them. They have a really powerful way of looking at the world, and I think so do poets. "
Kevin Young
World
Think
Looking
" In the absence of an answer that is complicated and sort of maybe troubling, we sometimes settle for the easy answer. It's easier to believe that my discomfort comes from some fact that is being hidden from me. "
Kevin Young
Me
Believe
Sometimes
" While claiming advocacy, what hoaxers really exhibit is self-interest. Often, this is because there is only the self to support their false claims; any revelations merely provide further opportunities for details and forgery. "
Kevin Young
Self
Support
Details
" It's a black Southern belief that blue glass keeps out bad spirits. "
Kevin Young
Glass
Blue
Black
" I feel music is another kind of literature. "
Kevin Young
Feel
Kind
Music