James Tate Quotes
I love my funny poems, but I'd rather break your heart. And if I can do both in the same poem, that's the best.James Tate
Quotes to Explore
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I'm profoundly lucky. I really like it. I really like my work. I've liked it since I was 5 years old.
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I'm actually quite a nice person. It's to do with the way I look, an uncompromising sort of face, brusque delivery and voice, and I think the combination of all that. When I'm doing pantomime, children will scream the place down before I open my mouth. There's obviously something that really gets them.
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I have spent a lot of time listening to people who are serving life sentences and getting to know them and the circumstances of their lives. I have never met anyone serving a long prison sentence who had anything close to what I could call a childhood; instead, the upbringings always - always - involve extreme situations of poverty and abuse.
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The film business was a great lesson in business combat and what it takes to survive.
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My opinion, my conviction, gains immensely in strength and sureness the minute a second mind as adopted it.
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When I won the belt, it was kind of a precedent... The only Canadian to have ever held it.
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I am interested in the way that we look at a given landscape and take possession of it in our blood and brain. None of us lives apart from the land entirely; such an isolation is unimaginable.
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Mind is everything. Muscle - pieces of rubber. All that I am, I am because of my mind.
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I love the simplicity and freedom of running. A pair of shoes, and you are all set to explore new trails.
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The first time that I ever saw Babe Ruth was in the Boston Red Sox clubhouse.
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Whether you call my heart affectionate, or you call it womanish: I confess, that to my misfortune, it is soft.
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YouTube has become more mature, both as a platform and as a community. So much content has been added in almost every conceivable category that there are no more free passes on just getting there first. I think there are greater expectations for audience participation, the kind of participation that makes a real impact in a show's community.
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The men and women who occupied the east coast of North America between 1607 and 1800 have been more closely scrutinized than any other collection of people in American history.
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Too many trees are killed to print the words of people who may not have all that much to say, and authors and journalists are equally culpable in this regard.
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Filming is a witnessing process. You don't try to control it, even though sometimes you wish you could because it can go really, really wrong for you.
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While it's easy for South Sudan to feel distant, the situation is all too real for the South Sudanese mothers choosing which child gets to eat tomorrow. This is a time when we must look outward together and declare that humanity has no borders - no one deserves to suffer like this, especially in a world of such abundance.
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Now it is human nature to want to eat to ones fill when hungry, to want to warm up when cold, to want to rest when tired. These all are a part of people's emotional nature.
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Clowning is a trick to get love close. I can hug 99 percent of people in the first second of contact if I'm in my clown character. The clown assumes your humanity. It assumes that, whatever trauma you've had, you can still love yourself.
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The reason I got into this union was to bring people together.
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Throughout life people will make you mad, disrespect you and treat you bad. Let God deal with the things they do, cause hate in your heart will consume you too.
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I guess, when I left university, I liked the idea of being a writer, and I thought then that being a writer really meant that you were a novelist. But if one of the impulses for being a novelist is wanting to be a storyteller, I never had any urge to tell stories.
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Dinah had all the class.
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Americans keep telling me they hate government. I always tell them: "Man, I've got a country for you: Go to Afghanistan; they don't have one." So if you're of that ilk, yes, you can have your private paradise, but if you're comfortable with government, then go with government.
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I love my funny poems, but I'd rather break your heart. And if I can do both in the same poem, that's the best.
James Tate
