I think that the job of poetry, its political job, is to refresh the idea of justice, which is going dead in us all the time.
You know, people speak in poetry all the time. They just don't realize it.
I've been writing since I was 10 or 11. I started with poetry because that was the easiest thing. It just kind of came naturally. I think at that time West Coast hip hop was huge; all these kids around me were like, 'I want to be a rapper.' But I'm a...
When I was young, I read everything I could lay my hands on, but the Scots in my storybooks spent their time fighting glorious battles, rowing across lochs, or escaping over moors of purple heather. Even those Scots were hard to find. For at school, ...
Poetry may make us from time to time a little more aware of the deeper, unnamed feelings which form the substratum of our being, to which we rarely penetrate; for our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves.
Poetry should help, not only to refine the language of the time, but to prevent it from changing too rapidly.
If we are going to have to worry all the time that we might offend some students' sensibilities, we are not going to be able to teach in a way that actually matters. We're not going to be able to teach about sex, gender, race, religion, or violence.
I have always loved magic realism as a form of writing. I have also been fascinated for a long time with the intersection of science and religion.
I also don't have organized religion on Pern. I figured - since there were four holy wars going on at the time of writing - that religion was one problem Pern didn't need.
Basically, fundamentalism is a modern phenomenon. In the same way that Hitler evoked a mythological religion of German purity and the glory of the past, the Islamists use religion to evoke emotions and passions in people who have been oppressed for a...
There was a time when someone would get on a plane and request to move their seat just because the person sitting next to them was of a different ethnicity or religion or nationality. But I don't think my generation wants that. That's how it used to ...
Well, the first time I ran into the term religion, people were asking whether you had any. You know, some people had religion and some people didn't have religion.
Religion theme aside, most of the time I'm in some sort of comedy and I'm a straight man and it's really just, let's wind this guy up and see him explode.
I know one thing: There are a billion Islamic people in the world today, and there will be about 2 billion by the time we're dead. They're not going to give up their religion.
People here argue about religion interminably, but it appears that they are competing at the same time to see who can be the least devout.
Galileo was no idiot. Only an idiot could believe that science requires martyrdom - that may be necessary in religion, but in time a scientific result will establish itself.
I am not going to condemn anybody. That's where religion gets a bad name, when people get holier than thou. We are all human. If my children make a mistake, I want them to know it is all right and they should try harder next time.
Most modern science fiction went to school on 'Dune.' Even 'Harry Potter' with its 'boy protagonist who has not yet grown into his destiny' shares a common theme. When I read it for the first time, I felt like I had learned another language, mastered...
When you're in prison, you either embrace religion or you reject it. I embraced it; it was a very spiritual time for me.
On a personal note, myself, I find religion - I can understand it, I can understand why we have it, as a kind of force on the planet. And I also at the same time think it's ludicrous.
I never paid much attention to being Jewish when I was a kid. In fact, I'd say my religion was more surfing than Judaism - that's what I spent most of my time doing.
