Quotes About Community

I take pride in the fact that a guy and a gal can come to my show, have a couple of beers and still go home with a little money in their pockets.

Different parts of Ireland have different alliances, because you have little pockets where counties are good at hurling, and different counties are good at football.

You must believe in people. You must give back their money in their own pockets.

There are different pockets of the rural U.S. and each one of those has their own colour, their own language, the things they're worried about. They're so different.

I savored my time on top of the podium by watching the American flag rise up out of the crowd as the anthem played, thinking about how every single second of training I've done was for this minute and how many people played a role in my achievement.

To be able to stand on the podium and see one Canadian flag raised is one thing, but to see two, it feels like you're not alone.

My parents' generation was definitely pre-telly, and they knew how to entertain each other. Everybody knew something that they could do - a song or a poem, or a piece of music. At school, I remember being a cat and then a budgie and then a bumble bee. I obviously thought all that was marvelous.

Poetry, as odd as it is, and as hard to figure out as it is, many times, it's almost something that we're used to. It's kind of like a dream language that we had centuries ago, so that when we speak poetically or write a poem about what's going on, a real difficult issue that's facing our communities, people listen.

Garrison Keillor read several of my poems on 'The Writer's Almanac' and I've heard from listeners nationally and internationally. That's one of the great gifts of email.

Poems, novels - these things belong to the nation, to the culture, and the people.

If I'm the people's poet, then I ought to be in people's hands - and, I hope, in their heart.

A poet can feel free, in my estimation, to write a poem for himself. Or a painter can paint a painting for himself. You can write a short story for yourself. But for me, comedy by its nature is communal. If other people don't get it, I'm not sure why you are doing it.

Every contemporary poet is a door to another poet.

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 has never been the language of barriers, it's always been the language of bridges.

I think that's what poetry does. It allows people to come together and identify with a common thing that is outside of themselves, but which they identify with from the interior.

Hip-hop is about the brilliance of pavement poetry.

I was excited by what my painter friends were doing, and they seemed to be interested in our poetry too, and that was a wonderful little, fizzy sort of world.

San Francisco has long been a leader in the arts, nurturing generations of painters, sculptors, poets, novelists, playwrights, film-makers, and performing artists and innovators of every kind.

I think the poets and musicians, they belong to everybody.

The community of poets I belong to is not as close as it used to be, if only for the fact that our lives have become busier: jobs, children, and the like.

I feel very connected to poets across the country.

Novelists and poets have existed side by side forever.

I'm very grateful to all the people of Fresno, to Philip Levine and all the poets before me, and all the farmworkers. I didn't get here by myself.