Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App

" 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

Related Quotes:

" I think the Internet is a free press, you know? "

" 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. "

" 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

" Great music - say jazz - has that inventive, improvisational quality that tells us something about life. "

" 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

Believe

Sometimes

" I feel music is another kind of literature. "

" When I was ten and in fifth grade, I read all of 'Robinson Crusoe' in one weekend. "

" 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. "

" We've learned quickly that the Web is far more pseudonymous than anonymous: online, our names have simply been changed to a number, an I.P. address, protocol, and code. "

Kevin Young

Been

Far

" Can you explore real issues as a fake character? Yes - it's called acting. Or fiction. But acting is not a method of engaging with the actual world, just as pretending to know what a character might eat does not a novel make - much less make that make-believe real. "

" People sometimes say hoaxes are about the blurry line between nonfiction and fiction. I just don't think it's a blurry line at all. "

" Here are the facts: my folks grew up so poor that, in the words of Redd Foxx, there were twenty o's between the p and r. "

" 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

Different

" Harper Lee's novel 'To Kill a Mockingbird' became iconic almost immediately after appearing in 1960: best-seller status; the Pulitzer Prize the next year; a classic movie soon after, with Gregory Peck in an Academy Award-winning role. "

" Certainly, there is, in our culture, this notion of, you know, you can become anything. You can change. "

" Not many poets have editors. "

" The first rule of influence is that there isn't any. The second rule of influence is that it is everywhere. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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

" Race is the true protagonist of the American novel. Our most popular classic fictions have known this, from 'Moby Dick' to 'Beloved;' all these books take on race or talk it out, often in other forms; they are less 'horror stories for boys' than ghost stories from a haunted conscience. "

" 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. "

" I think that I try really hard to think about how we deceive ourselves, and we let ourselves be deceived. "

" I was a professor for 20 years, 12 of those at Emory University. "

" 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. "

" I didn't know any poets growing up in Kansas. "

Kevin Young

Kansas

Know

" I try to read as a reader and also read as a writer. I mean, they're not so different. "

" The willed recovery of what's been lost - often forcibly, I suppose - is what keeps me going. It is this reason I found myself a poet and a collector and now a curator: to save what we didn't even know needed saving. "

" I do think there's a certain savviness to be able to recognize the way people want a good story, and I think that we underestimate that. "

" Pleasure is a revolutionary act in the face of pain. "