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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: 80
Born: 1943
Born: November 16
Film Critic
Novelist
Brooklyn
New York
Future
Interaction
Technocratic
Social
Club
Takeover
Running
Revolutionary
Takeovers
Night
Clubs
Revolutionaries
States
Dinner
Interactions
Think
Whose
Elite
Thinking
Party
Elites
State
Dry

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I've had an enduring appreciation of psychology.
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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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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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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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If someone in my family is getting emotionally bent out of shape, I've had to learn to adapt.
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In new work, we need to see the shadow, however faint, of previous literary effort.
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The essay is a wonderful medium. I might mention that some writers who longed to be novelists were better as essayists: Sontag, Baldwin, Vidal, Mary McCarthy, Mailer.
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Have fun writing, because it enhances both the writer's and reader's experience.
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You must read a lot of personal essays - you needn't reinvent the wheel.
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I like the freedom that comes with lowered expectations.
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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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