Quotes About Progress

I think writing a poem is like being a greyhound. Writing a novel is like being a mule. You go up one long row, then down another, and try not to look up too often to see how far you still have to go.

I think what gets a poem going is an initiating line. Sometimes a first line will occur, and it goes nowhere; but other times - and this, I think, is a sense you develop - I can tell that the line wants to continue. If it does, I can feel a sense of momentum - the poem finds a reason for continuing.

Then, of course, there are those sad occasions when a poet or a writer has not grown, and one has to let them go because they're just not making headway. But we have a very clear personal relationship with the authors.

I began to imitate what I was reading, and I started to become a poet, even though what I was writing were not good poems.

I try for a poetic language that says, This is who we are, where we have been, where we are. This is where we must go. And this is what we must do.

As civilization advances, poetry almost necessarily declines.

I didn't want to deal in poetry. I got rid of that after a few months.

The point of human evolution is adapting to circumstance. Not letting go of the old, but adapting it, is necessary.

No matter where you are, what point in your life you're at, it's not the end.

At the point we finished 'Abbey Road,' the game was up. We all accepted that.

There's always room for growth. I feel like I'll never get to the point where I'm 100 percent happy with where I am with my career.

Flying cars are not a very efficient way to move things from one point to another.

My heroes were Dylan, John Lennon and Picasso, because they each moved their particular medium forward, and when they got to the point where they were comfortable, they always moved on.

If you don't change, then what's the point of anything happening to you?

We expect forty-year-olds to have grown up at some point, and to be engaged and adult and take responsibility, and doing nothing would seem to go against that.

On the court, I want to try and get to the free-throw line a little more. And as a point guard, you can always get better at your decision-making and limiting your mistakes.

California is a bellwether state. California was the first state in the United States to overturn the laws against interracial marriage. It took 19 years for the rest of the country to come around to that point of view.

Technologists come at a problem from the point of view that the system is working a certain way, and if I engage in that system and actually change the rules of the system, I can make it work a different way.

If you have somebody who's brilliant and highly creative with a different point of view than you have, and a very different intellectual background, great things can happen.

Progress in science occurs in fits and starts, and paradigm shifts occur when evidence can be marshaled to support a new point of view.

We want to change to point of view about Latinos in the world and Colombians. Forget about the bad past.

I have frequently pointed out that the future belongs to nations with grains and not guns.

I do think the patriotic thing to do is to critique my country. How else do you make a country better but by pointing out its flaws?

Finger pointing never got anything done!