Top 40 Kevin Young Quotes

Words matter. These are the best Kevin Young Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.

The question of sort of music and history, I think, are

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
Certainly, there is, in our culture, this notion of, you know, you can become anything. You can change.
Kevin Young
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
I feel music is another kind of literature.
Kevin Young
Is there a bad song on ‘Sign O’ The Times?’ There isn’t.
Kevin Young
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
At our peril, we ignore the fact that black vernacular, like the blues, both has a form and performs… For just as there would be no American music without black folks, there would be very little of our American language.
Kevin Young
Forget reparations – we need to rescue aspects of black culture abandoned even by black folks, whether it is the blues or home cookin’ or broader forms of not just survival but triumph.
Kevin Young
What a poem can do is provide you this intimate eye that, for the length of a poem and hopefully a little bit after, can provide testimony or a point of view.
Kevin Young
I think music is poetry in the sense that I think the condition of poetry I’m going for has some qualities of music that it aspires to.
Kevin Young
I think the Internet is a free press, you know?
Kevin Young
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
I think I go with the Duke Ellington view on music. He said, ‘There’s two kinds of music – there’s good music, and then there’s the other kind.’
Kevin Young
A poem can provide testimony. A poem can provide solace. It can provide a connection.
Kevin Young
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
I think poems return us to that place of mud and dirt and earth, sun and rain.
Kevin Young
It’s a black Southern belief that blue glass keeps out bad spirits.
Kevin Young
There is, of course, no larger mass hysteria in American history than the epidemic of racism.
Kevin Young
Blackface remains exoticist and offensive as a practice, not just because of its long tradition of being used to mock black selfhood, sexuality, and speech but because of its assertion that black people are merely white people sullied by dark skin.
Kevin Young
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
Hip-hop at its zenith insists on thinking and dancing simultaneously. In fact, it sees them as synonymous.
Kevin Young
I write about what hoaxers do, but I also want us to think about what believers do. Why do we want to believe a story like James Frey’s ‘A Million Little Pieces?’ Why did we want to believe that Lance Armstrong really did all these things that, looking back, seemed impossible?
Kevin Young
I try to read as a reader and also read as a writer. I mean, they’re not so different.
Kevin Young
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
The first rule of influence is that there isn’t any. The second rule of influence is that it is everywhere.
Kevin Young
A DJ draws a connection between two seemingly disparate things and says, ‘Look, they are alike. You can dance to them.’
Kevin Young
Even Toni Morrison claiming Bill Clinton as ‘black’ could not prepare us for the election of America’s first undeniably black president, Barack Obama.
Kevin Young
It’s hard to describe one’s own alchemy that makes one into a writer, but I definitely think American language is so interesting, and specifically Southern language and black Southern language; it’s hard to separate Southern language from black language.
Kevin Young
Poems evolve. I don’t feel like I choose them; they just come to me.
Kevin Young
Pleasure is a revolutionary act in the face of pain.
Kevin Young
Not many poets have editors.
Kevin Young
I remember in the '80s, people would literally have arg

I remember in the ’80s, people would literally have arguments over the best guitarist.
Kevin Young
We had moved cross-country from upstate New York to Kansas in the heat wave of 1980, with two cars, no air-conditioning, and a black dog. I can still see the infernal temperature of a hundred and nineteen degrees on a bank sign somewhere near Ohio.
Kevin Young
When I’m in full-on writing mode and have the day, I try to get in my office around 10 A.M. and stop once ‘Judge Judy’ comes on at 4, when I quit and come down. Sometimes, I leave her on while I edit – if she can make the tough calls, then so can I.
Kevin Young
In the absence of an answer that is complicated and sort of maybe troubling, we sometimes settle for the easy answer. It’s easier to believe that my discomfort comes from some fact that is being hidden from me.
Kevin Young
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
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
The mid-eighteen-thirties marked the rise of eugenics and racialism, with phrenology emerging as just one of the many pseudosciences that sought to enact, reinforce, and restrict racial difference.
Kevin Young
To me, poetry is spoken – not exclusively, but there’s a mix of languages in it. That’s what I liked about ‘For the Confederate Dead;’ it has many different tones to it.
Kevin Young
Race is the true protagonist of the American novel. Our most popular classic fictions have known this, from ‘Moby Dick’ to ‘Beloved;’ all these books take on race or talk it out, often in other forms; they are less ‘horror stories for boys’ than ghost stories from a haunted conscience.
Kevin Young