Growing up, my grandmother did not want worldly music in the house. Then when I went out to California, I started listening to Spanish music, mostly Mexican music. But were I in Egypt, I would listen to the music of the people, or if I was in Italy, I’d listen to Italian music.
Want
It is a violation which has obsessed the tyrants of the twentieth century. They do not want simply to kill their opponents, but to liquidate them, to deny that they have ever existed.
What the government wants is something they never had before. They want total awareness. The question is, is that something we should be allowing?
I don’t want to govern the Palestinians. I don’t want them as subjects of Israel or as citizens of Israel. I want them to have their own independent state but a demilitarized state.
We know that we’re not supposed to be racially biased, and we don’t want to think of ourselves as racially biased, so we tell ourselves a different story.
Ours is a world where people don’t know what they want and are willing to go through hell to get it.
I teach a lecture course on American poetry to as many as 150 students. For a lot of them, it’s their only elective, so this is their one shot. They’ll take the Russian Novel or American Poetry, so I want to give them the high points, the inescapable poets.
I don’t have a child, so Women for Women is like my child. But I always said I would step down after 20 years. I didn’t want to be a 60-year-old woman holding on to something I created when I was 23.
Popular culture is simply a reflection of what the majority seems to want.
If you want to be an orator, first get your great cause.