With Shakespeare and poetry, a new world was born. New dreams, new desires, a self consciousness was born. I desired to know to know myself in terms of the new standards set by these books.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
I shall create a new world for myself.
As a child, what captivated me was reading the poems myself and realizing that there was a world without material substance which was nevertheless as alive as any other.
I'm a novelist: I spend a great part of my day pretending to myself that I'm in a different world, being a different person, faced with decisions I pretend I haven't created.
One isn't born one's self. One is born with a mass of expectations, a mass of other people's ideas - and you have to work through it all.
To know oneself is to disbelieve utopia.
'Born this Way' is about being yourself, and loving who you are and being proud.
I had started writing as a poet in a closed, post-Revival, claustrophobic world, where the shadows of the national upheaval and the intense effort - the intense self-conscious effort - to make a literary movement were still evident. Now we lived a life as writers that was more cosmopolitan, more open, that had more travel and exchange.
I will not leave a corner of my consciousness covered up, but saturate myself with the strange and extraordinary new conditions of this life, and it will all refine itself into poetry later on.
We have to raise the consciousness; the only way poets can change the world is to raise the consciousness of the general populace.
The world is a country which nobody ever yet knew by description; one must travel through it one's self to be acquainted with it.