Philip Kitcher Quotes

Though people may read more into Ulysses than I ever intended, who is to say that they are wrong: do any of us know what we are creating?Which of us can control our scribblings? They are the script of one's personality like your voice or your walk

We could think or feel as we wished toward the characters, or as the poet, discounting history, invited us to; we were the poet's guest, his world was his own kingdom, reached, as one of the poems told us, through the 'Ring of Words.

I think when I stop fighting, I die in a sense.

I can't read my poem "Distracted by an Ergonomic Bicycle" without thinking of Seattle, where the events of the poem took place, and I can't read "In Defense of the Semicolon" without thinking of Toronto - but why should that matter to anyone else? If another reader imagines "In Defense of the Semicolon" taking place in New Orleans, great.

In the eight years I worked at newspapers, even during a little stretch when I was a film critic, I was never, ever doing exclusively criticism. In the daily newspaper world, much more value is placed on reporting than on thinking abstractly about art. The eight years I was in newspapers, I was mainly a journalist in the conventional sense, and just doing criticism when there were opportunities.

I ought to warn you that my verse is of no interest to people who can think.

I think people feel very comfortable reviewing the idea of me, as opposed to what I've actually written. Most of the time, when people write about one of my books, they're really just writing about what they think I may or may not represent, as sort of this abstract entity. Is that unfair? Not really. If I put myself in this position where I'm going to kind of weave elements of memoir into almost everything, well, I suppose that's going to happen.

I think, now, younger generations do take that for granted in a lot of ways. I don't think that takes away from the struggle of identity and what that is. But the struggle for identity is everybody's struggle. No matter what it is.

The theater let me dramatize inner struggles, the push-pull between the inner life and the world, the various selves I presented according to what each world required. And it let me use my body.

Any work of art that can be understood is the product of journalism. The rest, called literature, is a dossier of human imbecility for the guidance of future professors.

If I were really asked to define myself, I wouldn’t start with race; I wouldn’t start with blackness; I wouldn’t start with gender; I wouldn’t start with feminism. I would start with stripping down to what fundamentally informs my life, which is that I’m a seeker on the path. I think of feminism, and I think of anti-racist struggles as part of it. But where I stand spiritually is, steadfastly, on a path about love.

I don't feel I have to struggle against allegory. I let the readers do the interpreting.

I want to reiterate that my understanding of the poem is not the poem's core, true meaning. Once a poem goes out into the world, the poet is just one more reader.

A friend said to me I'm like a walking New Yorker article. It's true! That's how I write. That's how I think.

It is possible that the malice of writers has been overrated (by myself among others). Reading their ruminations on their craft, one sees why this writer could not possibly like that one, would indeed consider him a menace. Literature is a battleground of conflicting faiths, and nobler passions than envy are involved.

Identity issues are hardwired into the way I think about character - it's almost as if I can't get away from them even if I want to.

You spend so much time wondering who you are, don't you think? You flounder about, searching for your identity, when most of the time it is plain as the nose on your face. You struggle with questions of purpose and need, and forget that the answers are found mostly inside yourselves.

Gandhi saw how people have to re-think their own individuality before engaging in political activity. Otherwise they're just playing the game that the adversary has set out.

I'm really shocked when critics get morally outraged at my fiction because they think I'm condoning what's going on. I never come in as the author and say, "Hey, okay. I'm interrupting the narrator here. I'm Bret Easton Ellis, and I'm the author."

The struggle we're dealing with these days, which, I think, is part of what the 60s represented, is how do we define our humanity?

A book cannot apologize for what people may think it should be. It has to be authoritative.

The Basic Eight and Watch Your Mouth both have first-person voices, and I ended up investigating those voices and investing so much in them that I think many people took them more seriously than they ought to have.

What kind of art do I want to make? What do I stand for? What inspires me? And then to have people in return respond to that... I think that's the greatest thing because throughout dancing, I'm always looking for that.

The motives and purposes of authors are not always so pure and high, as, in the enthusiasm of youth, we sometimes imagine. To many the trumpet of fame is nothing but a tin horn to call them home, like laborers from, the field, at dinner-time, and they think themselves lucky to get the dinner.

I always think about the books I'm doing in pretty much the same way. I'm simply trying to write that particular novel as well as that particular novel can be written. I want to listen to what it is telling me, trying to figure out what it wants to do as much as what I want to do with it. There's a negotiation that's constant and ongoing between me and the material I'm working with, because I'm trying to listen to it.