A Quote by Ted Kooser

My colleagues knew I was writing poems. I never hid it from them. I don't think they ever thought I was cheating on them. So, I think they probably saw it as being rather peculiar, that I was doing that sort of thing, but nobody ever suggested I shouldn't be doing it. I think that would be different on Madison Avenue or Wall Street, where you're really expected to be doing 110 percent for the company.
Wall Street was sort of at the height of the fame, everyone thought it was really cool, and I think taking that job, doing something probably more for the money was probably the worst thing I think I've ever done.
I thought that I wrote songs and wrote music, and that was sort of what I thought I was best at doing. And because nobody else was ever doing my songs, I felt - you know, I had to go out and do them.
I mean, you can't make anything without making mistakes, is the truth, and I'm very grateful for those misses that I've had in my career at home, because you learn so much more from them than you ever do from the hits. You learn that you really have to work hard, which I wasn't really doing at that time. You sort of think 'I've cracked it, I'm doing it.'And you start to think perhaps you're more of a dude than you really are.
WCW wasn't what I thought it should be. I thought it could be better. I would make suggestions, but nobody would want to hear them. They think you want their job. Please. It would be easier doing their job because they're used to doing nothing.
Keats's odes are among my favorite poems ever. As are Neruda's. So yes, I think my poems are odes, though I really just see those titles as ways of more or less orienting the poem. I've never thought about this until now, but I guess you could say that one effect of all the titles, their pervasiveness in the book, might be to once again, as so many other things do, put into question the meaning of the word "for," which I suppose is one of the great human questions: what is all this for? Why, and for whom, are we doing whatever we are doing?
I think a lot of people are very good, but I don't think anybody could do my rhythm. I was thinking, "If you want my rhythm" - and when I was writing, I was writing them for myself - "why am I watching another actor doing what I should be doing?" It was just a really unpleasant experience.
On stage, you have to have incredible confidence, or you would stop doing it. But I don't think I will ever get to the point where I go, 'I know exactly what I am doing,' and I don't think I want to.
I did not think of writing as a career and I don't think that I did this ever really, but I think of writing as something that I could do, I should do alongside whatever else I was doing. It simply grew on me.
I think that technology is always invented for historical reasons, to solve a historical problem. But they very soon reveal themselves to be capable of doing things that aren't historical that nobody had ever thought of doing before.
When I was in high school, my parents had this power over me - if I ever lied or got caught doing something that I shouldn't be doing, then I would no longer be able to go to LA and continue to pursue the acting thing. So that was this sort of looming thing they could had over me that just sort of really kept me in check throughout those formative years where you would typically be lying and doing bad stuff.
You have to be doing something very different from what everybody else is doing, hopefully different from what's ever been done before - something that nobody's thought of yet.
I like what I'm doing. Today at 88, I wouldn't think of quitting because I can't think of anything else I would rather do. And now with my lectures on all the charitable things that I do, just as you do, I think that what I'm doing matters.
I like what I'm doing. Today at 88, I wouldn't think of quitting because I can't think of anything else I would rather do. And now with my lectures on all the charitable things that I do, just as you do, I think that what I'm doing matters
I don't think we ever really think about it when we're doing it, because if you sort of go in with a plan of attack, it tends to take away the natural rhythm of songwriting.
And during the campaign of 1936, she writes that she and her brother would always rather be out doing things when they're sick, rather than take to their beds. And I think Eleanor Roosevelt always responded to pain by doing more, by doing something, by being active. And I think she just couldn't bear to look at her childhood grief. And she didn't.
Second of all, I don't think Wall Street is doing what it's supposed to be doing, even after the shameful performance of the last two years. They're are not allocating capital.
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