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"I do not read newspapers. I do not watch television. I am not interested in current events, although I will occasionally discuss them if other people want to discuss them."
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"Often people display a curious respect for a man drunk, rather like the respect of simple races for the insane... There is something awe-inspiring in one who has lost all inhibitions."
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Personal Development
"The last resort of kings, the cannonball. The last resort of the people, the paving stone."
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Personal Development
"It is not true that people are naturally equal for no two people can be together for even a half an hour without one acquiring an evident superiority over the other."
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Personal Development
"There are bad people who would be less dangerous if they were quite devoid of goodness."
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Personal Development
"There are only two kinds of people who are really fascinating - people who know absolutely everything, and people who know absolutely nothing."
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Personal Development
"We confess our little faults to persuade people that we have no large ones."
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Personal Development
"I do give books as gifts sometimes, when people would rather have one than a new Ferrari."
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Personal Development
"If something in your writing gives support to people in their lives, that's more than just entertainment-which is what we writers all struggle to do, to touch people."
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Personal Development
"Perhaps being old is having lighted rooms inside your head, and people in them, acting. People you know, yet can't quite name."
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Personal Development
"Most people are nice and just want to have a chat."
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"But I am not political in the current events sense, and I have never wanted anyone to read my poetry that way."
Poetry
"One, I have a wonderful publisher, Black Sparrow Press; as long as they exist, they will keep me in print. And they claim they sell very respectable numbers of my books, so I guess, and it's true, every place I go, my books are in libraries and on bookshelves."
Books
"So, I've never been politically correct, even before that term was available to us, and I have really identified with other people who don't want to be read as just a black poet, or just a woman poet, or just someone who represents a cause, an anti-Vietnam war poet."
War
"I'm perfectly happy when I look out at an audience and it's all women. I always think it's kind of odd, but then, more women than men, I think, read and write poetry."
Poetry
"My poems are almost all written as Diane. I don't have any problems with that, and if other women choose to identify with this, I think that's terrific."
Woman
"Because, in fact, women, feminists, do read my poetry, and they read it often with the power of their political interpretation. I don't care; that's what poetry is supposed to do."
Poetry
"I think that great poetry is the most interesting and complex use of the poet's language at that point in history, and so it's even more exciting when you read a poet like Yeats, almost 100 years old now, and you think that perhaps no one can really top that."
Poetry
"I think I'm a very good reader of poetry, but obviously, like everybody, I have a set of criteria for reading poems, and I'm not shy about presenting them, so if people ask for my critical response to a poem, I tell them what works and why, and what doesn't work and why."
Reading
"I think that's what poetry does. It allows people to come together and identify with a common thing that is outside of themselves, but which they identify with from the interior."
Poetry
"But I don't think that poetry is a good, to use a contemporary word, venue, for current events."
Poetry
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