A Quote by Paul Beatty

My good friend, the poet Kofi Natambu, once said, "Contradiction is how we operate."

Paul Beatty

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Paul Beatty
American - Author
Born: 1962

I once gave a workshop and I asked the women poets there, If you went back to that little town you've come from - these were from small towns - would you say, I'm a poet? And one of them said, If I said I was a poet in that town, they'd think I didn't wash my windows. And that stayed with me for so long, the sense of the collective responsibility of someone as against the individual thing it takes to be a poet.

Eavan Boland

All life events are formative. All contribute to what we become, year by year, as we go on growing. As my friend the poet Kenneth Koch once said, You aren't just the age you are. You are all the ages you ever have been!

Fred Rogers

He was a great poet" They lamented. No, he was not a great poet," said Theo, "He was a good poet, he could have been better. That's the real loss don't you see?

Lloyd Alexander

A friend of mine once asked how to make it in show business and I said "Be so good that they can't ignore you." She thought I was being flip but it's true. The challenge is trying to live up to the opportunities given me.

Steve Martin

I am not sure, once a poet has found out what has been written already, and how it was written - once, in short, he has learnt his trade - that he should bother with literature at all. Poetry is not like surgery, a technique that can be copied. Every operation the poet performs is unique, and need never be done again.

Philip Larkin

My good friend once said, "You guys think you're the stars in your own movie."

Mackenzie Davis

One must live in the middle of contradiction, because if all contradiction were eliminated at once life would collapse.

Barry Lopez

You can't be everybody's friend, you can't save the world, I learned this word: self-preservation. Once you do that, you can be friends with people, but how would you be a friend to anybody if you're not a friend to yourself.

Mike Tyson

What the poet says has never been said before, but, once he has said it, his readers recognize its validity for themselves.

W. H. Auden

Since the shock of former United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan's death, I have been reflecting on what made him so special. To my mind, it is simply this: Kofi Annan was both one of a kind and one of us.

Antonio Guterres

I think it was W.H. Auden who said he was lucky that his first favorite poet was Thomas Hardy, who was a good but not a great poet, because if you are exposed to the greats too soon it can just squash you as a writer.

David Duchovny

I got into an argument with someone because I said I think 2Pac will be regarded as a great poet. They said he was just a punk gangster. People said the same thing about Francois Villon, and he's now considered the best French Romantic poet of all time.

Scott Glenn

I remember being really hurt by a relative of a good friend of mine when I mentioned that someone was a great wrestler - she said, 'What do you mean? How can you be great at wrestling?' I stopped them and said, 'Do you think that what I do takes no talent whatsoever?' She realized how hurtful those words were.

Mick Foley

I've always found that once you're in the door of a place and you have the chance to show how you operate and how talented you are, then anything can happen.

Nancy Gibbs

Once upon a time, there was a prostitute called Maria. Wait a minute. "Once upon a time" is how all the best children's stories begin, and "prostitute" is a word for adults. How can I start a book with this apparent contradiction? But since, at every moment of our lives, we all have one foot in a fairy tale and the other in the abyss, let's keep that beginning.

Paulo Coelho

My family was once invited to lunch at a chateau owned by a friend of a friend. As we drove our rental car up to the giant castle, my kids gasped and said, 'They must be rich!'

Pamela Druckerman

A Quote by Paul Beatty

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