I know the American people. I've met a lot of them. I've met a lot more of them than any columnist has, or any talking head on TV has. And they're pretty sophisticated.
When I talk to a few thousand people, I just feel I am talking to an old friend. Like that. I never felt some kind of distance, so therefore, I feel one source of happiness. In that kind of atmosphere, my experience seems some benefit to some people.
"In my youth," said his father, "I look to the law, And argued each case with my wife; And the muscular strength, which it gave to my jaw Has lasted the rest of my life."
Though there is one part of writing that is solid and you do it no harm by talking about it, the other is fragile, and if you talk about it, the structure cracks and you have nothing.
I am uncomfortable with talking of poetry as a priestly profession, because I have little use for organized religions and priestly hierarchies. They have demoralized, persecuted, so many, including women, gays, non-believers.
They spent days, nights, weeks, and years talking, never accepting the fact that, good or bad, an idea only exists when someone tries to put it into practice.
The future is a concept, it doesn't exist. There is no such thing as tomorrow. There never will be, because time is always now. That's one of the things we discover when we stop talking to ourselves and stop thinking. We find there is only present, only an eternal now.
I mean, what is an un-birthday present?" A present given when it isn't your birthday, of course." Alice considered a little. "I like birthday presents best," she said at last. You don't know what you're talking about!" cried Humpty Dumpty. "How many days are there in a year?" Three hundred and sixty-five," said Alice. And how many birthdays have you?" One.
We see many persons talking the most wonderfully fine things about charity and about equality and the rights of other people and all that, but it is only in theory. I was so fortunate as to find one who was able to carry theory into practice. He had the most wonderful faculty of carrying everything into practice which he thought was right.
Interviewing people, I don't miss that at all. I do miss kibitzing with the audience because after every show I would spend half an hour to 40 minutes talking to people.
There's a lot of people talking about elitism and all of that.Yes, I went to Princeton and Harvard, but the lens through which I see the world is the lens that I grew up with. I am the product of a working class upbringing.
In talking with scholars, I observe that they lost on ruder companions those years of boyhood which alone could give imaginative literature a religious and infinite quality in their esteem.