Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App

" 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. "

Related Quotes:

" 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. "

" I think Barnum is at the center of American culture. He's helping to invent what we now think of as pop culture. He invented pretty much our notions of the circus. "

" For me Louisiana was mostly family when I was there. We hardly left; there was no need to... We hardly left the front porch. You would just sit, and folks would come by, and it was really old school in that way. "

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

" A DJ draws a connection between two seemingly disparate things and says, 'Look, they are alike. You can dance to them.' "

" For the black author, and even the ex-slave narrator, creativity has often lain with the lie - forging an identity, 'making' one, but 'lying' about one, too. "

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

" Hip-hop at its zenith insists on thinking and dancing simultaneously. In fact, it sees them as synonymous. "

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

" 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. "

" In a long poem or a sequence of poems, you're trying to formalize your obsessions and give them a shape and a name. The key is to realize if the connections you are making are ones with resonance. "

" I feel music is another kind of literature. "

" I think music is poetry in the sense that I think the condition of poetry I'm going for has some qualities of music that it aspires to. "

" 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. "

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

" The question of sort of music and history, I think, are so important to understanding the poem as an idea but also us as people in the world. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Writers need their totems, their altars. Mine, I feel, share the same randomness and utility of those belonging to painters I know, who are relentlessly visual and even poetic. "

" It's a black Southern belief that blue glass keeps out bad spirits. "

" 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. "

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

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

" 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.' "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" There's something about the kind of time travel that a poem can provide. It can take you to somewhere else - a culture far from you, a language far from you, but suddenly you're there. You're that person, seeing with that person's eyes. I think that's really tremendous. Even things like cinema or more traditional history can't quite do that. "

" We had moved cross-country from upstate New York to Kansas in the heat wave of 1980, with two cars, no air-conditioning, and a black dog. I can still see the infernal temperature of a hundred and nineteen degrees on a bank sign somewhere near Ohio. "

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