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.”

“A DJ draws a connection between two seemingly disparate things and says, 'Look, they are alike. You can dance to them.'”

“While claiming advocacy, what hoaxers really exhibit is self-interest. Often, this is because there is only the self to support their false claims; any revelations merely provide further opportunities for details and forgery.”

“I didn't technically grow up in the South, but both my parents were from there.”

“There is, of course, no larger mass hysteria in American history than the epidemic of racism.”

“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.”

“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.”

“People sometimes say hoaxes are about the blurry line between nonfiction and fiction. I just don't think it's a blurry line at all.”

“I rather think that archives exist to keep things safe - but not secret.”

“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.'”

“I'm not a historian. I know historians. I've worked with them. They have a really powerful way of looking at the world, and I think so do poets.”

“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.”

“That sense of mystery, but also of revelation, is what I turn to poems for. They're able to embody experience. We need more and more of that.”

“Can you explore real issues as a fake character? Yes - it's called acting. Or fiction. But acting is not a method of engaging with the actual world, just as pretending to know what a character might eat does not a novel make - much less make that make-believe real.”

“I was a professor for 20 years, 12 of those at Emory University.”

“Harper Lee's novel 'To Kill a Mockingbird' became iconic almost immediately after appearing in 1960: best-seller status; the Pulitzer Prize the next year; a classic movie soon after, with Gregory Peck in an Academy Award-winning role.”

“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.”

“A poem can provide testimony. A poem can provide solace. It can provide a connection.”

“Hip-hop at its zenith insists on thinking and dancing simultaneously. In fact, it sees them as synonymous.”

“I think the hardest thing, really, is trying not to write.”