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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.

Phillip Lopate

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Phillip Lopate
Age: 81
Born: 1943
Born: November 16
Film Critic
Novelist
Brooklyn
New York
State
Dry
Future
Interaction
Technocratic
Social
Club
Takeover
Running
Revolutionary
Takeovers
Night
Clubs
Revolutionaries
States
Dinner
Interactions
Think
Whose
Elite
Thinking
Party
Elites

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The dinner party is a suburban form of entertainment. Its spread in our big cities represents an insidious Fifth Column suburbanization of the metropolis.
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Have fun writing, because it enhances both the writer's and reader's experience.
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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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If someone in my family is getting emotionally bent out of shape, I've had to learn to adapt.
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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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The prospect of a long day at the beach makes me panic. There is no harder work I can think of than taking myself off to somewhere pleasant, where I am forced to stay for hours and 'have fun'.
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For most of my life, I have wanted broad impact but now, at 72, I'm not so sure that's always my first priority.
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You must read a lot of personal essays - you needn't reinvent the wheel.
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Hedonism can be a rational response to a difficult life.
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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.
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In new work, we need to see the shadow, however faint, of previous literary effort.
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