19 Quotes by Phillip Lopate

Until people see poetry as springing from all of life, they will isolate it in a creativity corner and treat it like a mascot.

To be a writer is a monstrously arrogant act. It presumes that you should be listened to for pages on end... But there is much in the culture to clip the wings of arrogance, mute assertion, and encourage speedy consensus.

I finished reading, not from the sweet, low pathos of the tale, but from the knowledge of the writer’s success. It is so difficult to do anything well in this mysterious world.

He felt his poverty; without a cent, without a home, without land, tools, or savings, he had entered into competition with rich, landed, skilled neighbors. To be a poor man is hard, but to be a poor race in a land of dollars is the very bottom of hardships.

Now, if anything in the world is complex, language is complex.

I have also time on my hands to correct my opinions, and polish my periods;.

The solution to entrapment in the narcissistic hothouse of self is to not relinquish autobiographical writing, but to expand the self by bringing one’s curiosity to interface with more and more history and the present world.

Men do not change from enemies to friends by the alteration of a name:.

A young person still thinks it is possible–there is time enough–to become all things: athlete and aesthete, soldier and pacifist, anchorite and debauchee.