A Quote by W. H. Auden
It's frightening how easy it is to commit murder in America. Just a drink too much. I can see myself doing it. In England, one feels all the social restraints holding one back. But here, anything can happen.
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It feels like it's just starting in America and the UK. It's great to have a loyal fanbase in Australia and New Zealand. People in America say how polished our band are, but that didn't happen overnight; that came from doing all this touring back home.
If I'm going to be the best in what I do, I have to study what I'm doing, I have to see what I'm doing. I have to see it, I have to hear it. I'm just starting to appreciate myself - not starting, but appreciating myself in a way where I can look at myself back in a movie or listen to myself as much as I do now.
Ever since I was young I understood the whole meaning of life isn't how much money you accumulate, how much fame you experience, it's how many lives you touch, how many faces you bring smiles to. I see myself back in Hawaii doing something in the community to improve the lives of young children. Everything I've done is to prepare myself to give back.
I can feel how an audience is reacting when I'm on a stage, but when you are on stage, your perception is distorted. That's something you just have to know. It's like pilots that fly at high Gs and they lose, sometimes, consciousness and hand/eye coordination and they just have to know that that's going to happen. They have to be trained to not try to do too much while they are doing that. So when you are on stage, you have to be aware that you are wrong about how it feels a lot of times.
There's health risks in anything, even if you're just drinking soda or drinking lemonade! If you drink too much lemonade you drink too much sugar and you could get diabetes.
In mid-life the man wants to see how irresistible he still is to younger women. How they turn their hearts to stone and more or less commit a murder of their marriage I just don't know, but they do.
It's a frightening thing to act on your opinions. You've got to find confidence in yourself, not in what others think of you. I'm still trying to separate how I see myself from how I'm perceived. It's not easy, but it's worth it.
I haven't taken into account how much I drink. I do drink a lot when I am on stage anyway. You will see me come back and have sips of water. I haven't taken into account how much.
How easy is murder when one calls it by a different name? How much easier is it for the conscience to condone "reaping" than "killing"-and when one knows that death isn't the end, does it stop the killing hand for fear of retribution, or does it simply make it easier to kill, because, if life continues, how can murder be murder at all?
I don't hide anything about myself, so I don't find it difficult to talk about things that happen in my life... But at the same time, I don't like putting myself out there too much. That's how I am.
What feels most productive to me isn't to think so much in terms of how I can be alternative, but how I can be subversive in a way that feels organic, how I can connect with people, and how I can just be myself, which may be the hardest thing to be.
For me, the experience of not living in America was recognizing that I was American. You don't think about yourself being so culturally encoded, so nationally stamped; you don't discover that when you're a tourist for a month. You see how you reflect the place you're from. When I came back from living in Europe, I was very struck by how I didn't see America as the center of the world in the same way. It's very easy to slip back because America is so powerful. But any place you live is the center of the world.
When you go to that other country you realize that in France and in England, you don't ask somebody what they do for a living when you meet someone. A lot of the obvious things, the shortcuts we take in America - in America you can talk about money all you want. You can ask how much they make, rent they pay, how much their house costs and how much their car costs, and they'll feel comfortable telling you. But it's scandalous to ask anyone in England or France a question like that.
If you don't take a Sabbath, something is wrong. You're doing too much, you're being too much in charge. You've got to quit, one day a week, and just watch what God is doing when you're not doing anything.
I think the whole emphasis in England, in universities, on practical criticism (but not that so much as on historical criticism, knowing what period a line comes from) this is almost paralysing. In America, in University, we read - what? - T. S. Eliot, Dylan Thomas, Yeats, that is where we began. Shakespeare flaunted in the background. I'm not sure I agree with this, but I think that' for the young poet, the writing poet, it is not quite so frightening to go to university in America as it is in England, for these reasons.
The point of fact is, just in simple ways, you can see how much better things have gotten. I mean, when I was a child, I lived in England, and England was just amazingly polluted. We didn't use that word. We just said it was it all covered with soot.
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