A Quote by Billy Collins
The literary world is so full of pretension, and there's such an enormous gap between how seriously poets take themselves and how widely they're ignored by everybody else.
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One of the ridiculous aspects of being a poet is the huge gulf between how seriously we take ourselves and how generally we are ignored by everybody else.
You have to keep a sense of humor about yourself, more than anything else. You've got to take the issues very seriously, but you can't take yourself too seriously. And Washington is a city in which everybody takes themselves extraordinarily seriously.
I'm feminist in that I believe that there should be equality between men and women. I get deeply frustrated on a daily basis by the enormous gender divide in the U.S. literary world. But I don't know how to deal with it, so I don't tend to say much about it.
I think people can stand to take themselves just a little less seriously. I'm fighting the war against pretension.
The reality is that not only were we massively hit in 2008 when the bubble burst, and then we realized how deep the social gap, the economic gap in the world is between the super rich and the poor; also, we realized how impacted the environment has been. So there's been a physical consequence of that.
Most performers take themselves too seriously. They forget there is a difference between the characters they play on the screen or stage and themselves, but the public doesn't forget there is a difference. They see how silly it is if you try to be the same person all the time.
Poets take themselves very seriously.
People don't live a good life when they take themselves too seriously, because they're always concerned about what everybody else thinks.
I am always struck by how difficult it is for people to see how much cruelty they are bringing not only upon animals but upon themselves and their loved ones and other people, how much we are screwing up the planet, how much we are hurting our own health, how hard it is to change all that, how eager people are to make a buck at everybody else's expense - all those things are discouraging.
How people see the world is often a reflection of how they see themselves. If they think that the world is just a cesspool of lies and deceit, then they themselves may be full of lies and deceit. Watch out for those people who are always telling you just how corrupt the rest of the world is. As the saying goes, 'It takes one to know one.'
Humorists can never start to take themselves seriously. It's literary suicide.
How can you possibly be happy if you think you're a person? Because we all know, just by definition, that people are definitely not happy because they take everything too seriously. They take themselves seriously.
Fans, wrestlers, and even the general public have been conditioned to believe that there's an enormous skill gap between WWE and everyone else.
I can't talk about the education of black children if I ignored two of my nieces who were a couple of grade levels behind. I believe that charity begins at home, and I take seriously the role of a godfather to fill the gap when the parents aren't doing their job.
Bridget [Jones] was always, at heart, about the gap between how you feel you're expected to be and how you actually are and that gap has only widened. Young people now are entering an uncharted sea, where there's huge pressure to judge yourself on how many Likes or Followers you get on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram, rather than the on important things like being kind, honest, resilient, funny and a good friend.
There is a world which poets cannot seem to enter. It is the world everybody else lives in. And the only thing poets seem to have in common is their yearning to enter this world.
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