Quotes About Authenticity

I kind of keep my personality in my pocket a lot. When I start to do stand-up, that's not my true personality either. It's the personality of a guy who hasn't been able to say what he wanted to say.

I think I'm probably much better at the boots and pocket knife thing than I am at the high heels and martini thing.

I haven't left the house without a packet of Kleenex in my back pocket for as long as I can remember. Whenever I start thinking I'm incredibly cool, the packet of Kleenex in my back pocket brings me right back down to earth.

Yes, I started out as an anchor on television, but that was just 'me being me,' trying to make some pocket money.

Even as a kid, I wore J.C. Penney plain-pocket jeans because they were plain pockets. I didn't want anybody's name on my backside. I personally don't like to wear clothing that is named for somebody or has someone's likeness all over it.

It's what Kitty Carlisle said in her book: Don't interview people about what they do, interview them about what they love. I want my interviews to come out of the side pockets.

I don't write poems. I don't give flowers to girls... yet.

I wish I could write lyrical poems, but I just write the way they come.

I wish I'd been better able to resist the sense of obligation to write some of the poems I did. It's in the nature of commissioned work to be written too much from the side of your mind that knows what it's doing, which dries up the poetry.

Often it seems that there are writers who are their best selves on the page. That Seamus Heaney was as genuine and deeply admirable in person as in his poems was to me a gift, then as now.

I write poems, I meditate. I don't live up to people's expectations. I don't do the conventional cool things - I know I am the coolest person.

Even when I was in school, I was doing papers and writing poems; I always had an edge to my delivery. It was never conscious, but it was more so my organic way of thinking about things.

I shall try to write a poem that is about the moment but doesn't betray things that are true to me as a poet.

As a public poet, people often don't see the reality of my life.

The poet is on the side of undeceiving the world.

I want to be a poet and have a chance to explore that and let people know what's really on my mind.

I try to stay a civilian, to live as a human, not as a poet.

The reason a poet is a poet is to write poems, not to advertise himself as a poet.

All that I am is me. So I'm not really a poet or a writer or an actor or an activist; I'm me, and these are things that I do.

I'm not literary, and I'm not academic, and I don't think like a poet, so my stuff will never be like that.

Everyone is their own kind of poet - you can't miss it when their words are written down.

I have never considered myself a poet. I have no interest in poetic artistry.

In 'Blindspotting' I play a girl from Oakland, I've got an accent, I've got long, '90s 'Poetic Justice' braids, and in 'Monsters and Men' I play a girl from Brooklyn.

Poetry, even when apparently most fantastic, is always a revolt against artifice, a revolt, in a sense, against actuality.