I gave up on new poetry myself thirty years ago, when most of it began to read like coded messages passing between lonely aliens on a hostile world. – Russell Baker
When sudden death takes a president, opportunities for new beginnings flourish among the ambitious and the tensions among such people can be dramatic, as they were when President Kennedy was killed. – Russell Baker
Reporters thrive on the worlds misfortune. For this reason they often take an indecent pleasure in events that dismay the rest of humanity. – Russell Baker
It seems to be a law in American life that whatever enriches us anywhere except in the wallet inevitably becomes uneconomic. – Russell Baker
Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things. – T.S. Eliot, Tradition and the Individual Talent, 1919
My first memory of the Rolling Stones is listening to Satisfaction at a sixth-grade slumber party at a friends house in Ankara, Turkey, where my family was living at the time. In the middle of our sleepover, my friends dad stopped the record when he heard the words girlie action! – Gayle King