Kevin Young Quotes

I think the Internet is a free press, you know?

Kevin Young

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Quotes to Explore

• For me Louisiana was mostly family when I was there. We hardly left; there was no need to... We hardly left the front porch. You would just sit, and folks would come by, and it was really old school in that way.

  

  Kevin Young
  • School
  • Family

• I didn't technically grow up in the South, but both my parents were from there.

  

  Kevin Young
  • Up
  • Parents

• It took a while for anyone to want to publish 'To Repel Ghosts.' I thought people would want to publish a three-hundred-and-fifty-page book about a dead painter, but they didn't.

  

  Kevin Young
  • People
  • Book

• For the black author, and even the ex-slave narrator, creativity has often lain with the lie - forging an identity, 'making' one, but 'lying' about one, too.

  

  Kevin Young
  • Black
  • Creativity
  • Identity

• Music and the blues, they have taught me a lot. I think in this book, 'Book Of Hours,' there is this blues sensibility. There are moments of humor even in the sorrow, and I'm really interested in the way that the blues have that tragic-comic view of life - what Langston Hughes called 'laughing to keep from crying.'

  

  Kevin Young
  • Life
  • Music
  • Book

• Here are the facts: my folks grew up so poor that, in the words of Redd Foxx, there were twenty o's between the p and r.

  

  Kevin Young
  • Up
  • Words

• Listen to the late Isaac Hayes covering 'Walk on By' by Burt Bacharach or Mayfield singing The Carpenters' vanilla-seeming 'We've Only Just Begun,' and you realize soul's insistence on transformation: Mayfield in particular makes the song not just about love but the start of revolution.

  

  Kevin Young
  • Soul
  • Song
  • Singing

• I do think there's a certain savviness to be able to recognize the way people want a good story, and I think that we underestimate that.

  

  Kevin Young
  • People
  • Good

• We've learned quickly that the Web is far more pseudonymous than anonymous: online, our names have simply been changed to a number, an I.P. address, protocol, and code.

  

  Kevin Young
  • Anonymous

• 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.

  

  Kevin Young
  • People
  • World
  • Music

• The hoax is the very absence of truth, which usually means art is absent, too - hoaxes regularly substitute claims of reality for imagination, facts for form, acting as if artifice is the antithesis of art.

  

  Kevin Young
  • Art
  • Truth
  • Reality

• I try to have a lot of influences, which is to say not to have one specific influence too strongly; that can end up badly.

  

  Kevin Young
  • Up

• In a long poem or a sequence of poems, you're trying to formalize your obsessions and give them a shape and a name. The key is to realize if the connections you are making are ones with resonance.

  

  Kevin Young
  • Long
  • Trying

• For 'The Grey Album,' I'd been thinking about the good side of lying - lying as a kind of improvisatory act in black culture. Afterward, it nagged at me because there are those other kinds of lies that I think are all around us, and I was fascinated about hoaxes in general. So 'Bunk' became a natural extension of 'The Grey Album.'

  

  Kevin Young
  • Good
  • Thinking
  • Black

• I didn't know any poets growing up in Kansas.

  

  Kevin Young
  • Up
  • Growing

• I think that I try really hard to think about how we deceive ourselves, and we let ourselves be deceived.

  

  Kevin Young

• When I was ten and in fifth grade, I read all of 'Robinson Crusoe' in one weekend.

  

  Kevin Young
  • Weekend

• In African-American culture, there's often a family historian, someone who does the genealogy or keeps the family Bible. I became aware that might be one role the poet has.

  

  Kevin Young
  • Family
  • American
  • Culture

• Hip-hop at its zenith insists on thinking and dancing simultaneously. In fact, it sees them as synonymous.

  

  Kevin Young
  • Thinking

• Not many poets have editors.

  

  Kevin Young

• Is there a bad song on 'Sign O' The Times?' There isn't.

  

  Kevin Young
  • Bad
  • Song

• We quickly erase hoaxes once exposed, excising the monstrous palimpsest, because as with any witch hunt or obvious fake, afterward we can't quite explain why we ever believed the outrageous thing in the first place.

  

  Kevin Young
  • Why
  • Fake
  • Witch

• I try to read as a reader and also read as a writer. I mean, they're not so different.

  

  Kevin Young
  • Different

• I think the Internet is a free press, you know?

  

  Kevin Young
  • Free