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Hedonism can be a rational response to a difficult life.

Phillip Lopate

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Phillip Lopate
Age: 80
Born: 1943
Born: November 16
Film Critic
Novelist
Brooklyn
New York
Hedonism
Rational
Response
Difficult
Life

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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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... 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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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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I've had an enduring appreciation of psychology.
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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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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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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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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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You must read a lot of personal essays - you needn't reinvent the wheel.
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My other work, teaching, also is satisfying because I can be with people but in controlled circumstances, which aren't as likely to yield the pain of dealing with family.
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I like the freedom that comes with lowered expectations.
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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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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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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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