Home
Authors
Tags
App
Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App
" Pleasure is a revolutionary act in the face of pain. "
Kevin Young
Pain
Revolutionary
Act
Related Quotes:
" 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. "
Kevin Young
Year
Classic
Iconic
" 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
" 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
" 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. "
Kevin Young
Black
Lying
Creativity
" For 'The Grey Album,' I'd been thinking about the good side of lying - lying as a kind of improvisatory act in black culture. Afterward, it nagged at me because there are those other kinds of lies that I think are all around us, and I was fascinated about hoaxes in general. So 'Bunk' became a natural extension of 'The Grey Album.' "
Kevin Young
Thinking
Good
Think
" I remember in the '80s, people would literally have arguments over the best guitarist. "
Kevin Young
Remember
People
Best
" Music and the blues, they have taught me a lot. I think in this book, 'Book Of Hours,' there is this blues sensibility. There are moments of humor even in the sorrow, and I'm really interested in the way that the blues have that tragic-comic view of life - what Langston Hughes called 'laughing to keep from crying.' "
Kevin Young
Moments
Life
Book
" 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. "
Kevin Young
Wave
Black
New York
" I didn't know any poets growing up in Kansas. "
Kevin Young
Kansas
Know
Up
" Listen to the late Isaac Hayes covering 'Walk on By' by Burt Bacharach or Mayfield singing The Carpenters' vanilla-seeming 'We've Only Just Begun,' and you realize soul's insistence on transformation: Mayfield in particular makes the song not just about love but the start of revolution. "
Kevin Young
Soul
Love
Revolution
" 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
" 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. "
Kevin Young
Say
Sometimes
Line
" 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
" 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. "
Kevin Young
Race
True
Conscience
" 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. "
Kevin Young
Time
Culture
Eyes
" Not many poets have editors. "
Kevin Young
Many
Editors
Poets
" 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
" Great music - say jazz - has that inventive, improvisational quality that tells us something about life. "
Kevin Young
Jazz
Life
Music
" There's always been really interesting, diverse black voices talking and arguing and counterpointing. "
Kevin Young
Always
Talking
Interesting
" 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. "
Kevin Young
Going
Think
Some
" A poem can provide testimony. A poem can provide solace. It can provide a connection. "
Kevin Young
Solace
Poem
Testimony
" I rather think that archives exist to keep things safe - but not secret. "
Kevin Young
Keep
Think
Things
" The first rule of influence is that there isn't any. The second rule of influence is that it is everywhere. "
Kevin Young
First
Influence
Rule
" 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. "
Kevin Young
Words
Facts
Here
" 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
" I didn't technically grow up in the South, but both my parents were from there. "
Kevin Young
Both
Parents
Up
" I think the hardest thing, really, is trying not to write. "
Kevin Young
Think
The Hardest Thing
Write
" 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. "
Kevin Young
Character
Fake
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. "
Kevin Young
You
Eye
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
Up