Quotes About Identity

I will go out of this world feet first with my Lib Dem membership card in my pocket.

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 feel like as much as there's a little pocket of people who do know me, there's a whole bigger pocket that doesn't and I want them to know me and understand who I am for real before making pre-judgments.

I feel like any single woman of color who's been onstage has a Shakespeare monologue in her back pocket, and a monologue from 'For Colored Girls.' It's just part of what you should have, as a woman of color.

Probably my first couple years in the league, I started paying more attention to what I was wearing. Once I got a few bucks in my pocket and I could afford some nice things, and you get to go, 'OK, let's try some of these things.' And once you try something you like, you probably don't change it much.

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.

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.

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 never felt oppressed because of my gender. When I'm writing a poem or drawing, I'm not a female; I'm an artist.

No good poem, however confessional it may be, is just a self-expression. Who on earth would claim that the pearl expresses the oyster?

Whether you listen to a piece of music, or a poem, or look at a picture or a jug, or a piece of sculpture, what matters about it is not what it has in common with others of its kind, but what is singularly its own.

This creature of the poem may assemble itself into a being with its own centrifugal force.

The question of sort of music and history, I think, are so important to understanding the poem as an idea but also us as people in the world.

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

Many of my poems are not sexual.

But you'd have a job to find many of my poems which would seem to be very influenced by a particular person.

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

People called me Cilla when I was little because I was always singing and writing poems.

I was living in Britain and then America, but it wasn't until I returned to live in Ireland in the late '70s that I really became aware of Seamus Heaney. I discovered quickly that his poems are very accessible.

I am a guest of the French language. My poems in French are born of my interaction with the French language, which is not the same as that of a French poet.

I am not less poet; I am more conscious of all that I am, am not, and might become.

I'm a poet, first and foremost as a writer. That's who I am. That's what I'm most comfortable writing.

My dad was the baby. When he was born they were already successful. They sent him to business school - he probably would have loved to have been a poet or a writer or something, and he was very creative.

When Robert Frost was alive, I was known as the other new England poet, which is to be barely known at all.