The job has left me with a healthy disregard for what you might call Public Life. I have … - Michael Longley

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When you die, do you want to feel ashamed of what you've done with your life? Feel ashamed of what your life meant?

Michael Longley

The job has left me with a healthy disregard for what you might call Public Life. I have no desire now to go to receptions, to be seen at gatherings of the great and the good, to stand and be bored to death by men in grey suits.

Bored, Disregard, Grey, Healthy, Jobs, Men

Same Author Quotes

There's always a danger of writers believing their own publicity. We live in a world of puff and solicited blurb, a world of favours and backscratching.

Believe, Live, Publicity, Puff, World

I would insist that poetry is a normal human activity and its proper concern all the things that happen to people.

Concern, Happen, Human, Normal, People

In America, where you'd have thought the country's so huge it couldn't happen quite so cosily, everyone's giving his imprimatur to everyone else. You line up three or four well-known poets and a couple of eminent academics on the dustjacket, and the rest of academe follow like sheep. That's death really, if you take pleasure in it. Mind you, the occasional puff's hard to resist, but you shouldn't inhale.

America, Country, Couple, Mind, Quite, Rest

I suppose that as you grow older some sense of an accumulating oeuvre is unavoidable.

Accumulating, Grows, Oeuvre, Older, Sense, Suppose

I don't know where the shape of a poem comes from. I certainly don't impose it. I write out of a jumble of emotions and vague notions and scraps of knowledge. At some stage a form or, rather, a shape mysteriously emerges.

Emerges, Emotion, Emotions, Know, Shapes, Writing

Similar Quotes

Aristotle

The legislator should direct his attention above all to the education of youth; for the neglect of education does harm to the constitution. The citizen should be molded to suit the form of government under which he lives. For each government has a peculiar character which originally formed and which continues to preserve it. The character of democracy creates democracy, and the character of oligarchy creates oligarchy.

Character, Democracy, Government, Neglect, Under

Samuel Johnson

There is reason to suspect, that the distinctions of mankind have more show than value, when it is found that all agree to be weary alike of pleasures and of cares; that the powerful and the weak, the celebrated and obscure, join in one common wish, and implore from nature's hand the nectar of oblivion.

Common, Hands, Humanity, Obscure, Powerful, Weak

Steve Jobs

When you start looking at a problem and it seems really simple, you don't really understand the complexity of the problem. Then you get into the problem, and you see that it's really complicated, and you come up with all these convoluted solutions. That's sort of the middle, and that's where most people stop. . . But the really great person will keep on going and find the key, the underlying principle of the problem - and come up with an elegant, really beautiful solution that works.

Beautiful, Keep, Keys, Simple

Constantin Stanislavski

What is important to me is not the truth outside myself, but the truth within myself.

Important, Truth

Jim Butcher