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... I vowed that I would always respect the right of an individual to kill himself. Whether suicide was a moral or immoral act I no longer felt sure, but of the dignity of its intransigence I was convinced.

Phillip Lopate

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Phillip Lopate
Age: 81
Born: 1943
Born: November 16
Film Critic
Novelist
Brooklyn
New York
Sure
Suicidal
Moral
Immoral
Whether
Suicide
Individual
Convinced
Felt
Dignity
Right
Kill
Always
Longer
Would
Respect
Vowed

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You must read a lot of personal essays - you needn't reinvent the wheel.
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It bothers me when I can't, for example, remember a name. I don't know if it's pre-senility or whether there are too many names packed in our brains.
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Until people see poetry as springing from all of life, they will isolate it in a creativity corner and treat it like a mascot.
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My wife and daughter have accused me of being too silent at breakfast but I don't want to talk when I don't have much to say.
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I am apt to be harsh in my secret judgments of others, seeing them as defective because they are not enough like me.
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I like the freedom that comes with lowered expectations.
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I've had an enduring appreciation of psychology.
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Have fun writing, because it enhances both the writer's and reader's experience.
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In new work, we need to see the shadow, however faint, of previous literary effort.
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Think of a dinner party as a club of revolutionaries, a technocratic elite whose social interactions that night are a dry run for some future takeover of the state.
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