Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
It was great to go to Stanford. Until that point, I'd spent my whole life in southeast Michigan, working for General Motors. I was in a different part of the country. People didn't know what General Motors was, didn't care, or if they did, they might not have had a favorable impression. I saw people driving nondomestic vehicles.
As a freshman at Stanford University - a young black man - when O.J. Simpson was acquitted of murder, it was a joyful moment. I was happy, absolutely. It wasn't necessarily a matter of whether he was guilty or innocent, per se, it was a matter of finally seeing someone who looked like me have the justice system work in their favor.
I went to school in California, at Stanford when I was seventeen, and I lived in San Francisco until I was twenty-three, and then I lived in Hungary for, like, a summer, and then I went to Iowa for three years. At Iowa, I actually did the fiction program, not poetry. I was a fiction writer for a long time before I was 'out' as a poet.
I can see a day soon where you'll create your own college degree by taking the best online courses from the best professors from around the world - some computing from Stanford, some entrepreneurship from Wharton, some ethics from Brandeis, some literature from Edinburgh - paying only the nominal fee for the certificates of completion.
We had this thing at Stanford called the 'Campus Loop,' and then we had another run called 'The Dish,' and you'd run up to this giant satellite dish, which was probably extremely unhealthy. I would do those two runs, and I just found it so therapeutic. My girlfriends and I would have these great conversations about guys and school and life.
