James Dickey Quotes

Find out what you do best, and then don't do it.

I once had the nerve to ask Picasso the question, 'What is art?' He answered, 'Art is a lie which makes us see the truth.

So much destruction in modern war takes place miles and miles away from the source of the destruction, the human being who has caused it.

He can't imagine the result of the mission because he never saw it.

The New York Quarterly is an amazing, intelligent, crazy, creative, strange, and indispensable magazine.

It takes an awful lot of time for me to write anything. I have endless drafts, one after another; and I try out 50, 75, or a hundred variations on a single line sometimes. I work on the process of refining low-grade ore. I get maybe a couple of nu ggets of gold out of 50 tons of dirt. It is tough for me. No, I am not inspired.

Detachment produces a peculiar state of mind. Maybe that's the worst sentence of all, to be deprived of feeling what a human being ought to be entitled to feel.

To be precise and reckless: that is the consummation devoutly to be wished.

What you have to realize when you write poetry, or if you love poetry, is that poetry is just naturally the greatest god damn thing that ever was in the whole universe

You are bound, my hunch is, to make it just fine.

What I want is to be willing to fail rather than stagnate.

William Packard surely must be one of the great editors of our time.

I need about one hundred fifty drafts of a poem to get it right, and fifty more to make it sound spontaneous.

I don’t believe that a reviewer or a critic can really criticize well unless he can praise well.

We've always had a tradition in America of hounding our artists to death. Look at the list of our great artists, you see a continual history of defeat, frustration, poverty, alcoholism, drug addiction. The best poets of my generation are all suicides.

I feel very happy to see the sun come up every day. I feel happy to be around. ... I like to take this day- any day-and go to town with it.

I want you to hear a new version of Dueling Banjos. Anyone else is welcome.

What a view, i said again. The river was blank and mindless with beauty. It was the most glorious thing I have ever seen. But it was not seeing, really. For once it was not just seeing. It was beholding. I beheld the river in its icy pit of brightness, in its far-below sound and indifference, in its large coil and tiny points and flashes of the moon, in its long sinuous form, in its uncomprehending consequence.

If you write well, you don't have to dress funny.

Poetry is a hazardous occupation, very hazardous. There may be bad things in there inside you that maybe you can't handle.

I do think the author ought to be able to give a good reason for the way things are in his poem. Not a bad question to ask oneself.

Then you develop a kind of critical sense about what you write. You can tell when something is good, but it would be just as good in somebody else's work too. You want to hold out for those things only you can say.

The body is the one thing you can't fake; it's just got to be there.

Yet technique matters, even so. God uses it, for a buffalo is not a leopard.

The true feeling of sex is that of a deep intimacy, but above all of a deep complicity.

Poetry makes possible the deepest kind of personal possession of the world.

A poet trains himself to stand out in a storm and be struck by lightning. If he is lucky enough to be struck six times, he becomes immortal. Randall Jarrell said it and he's right.

Flight is the only truly new sensation than men have achieved in modern history.

To say that its wrong to feel this way is not the point; you do feel it. All you see is a flash of fire and, depending on your altitude, you don't even see that sometimes.

There are so many selves in everybody, and just to explore and exploit one is wrong, dead wrong, for the creative person.

The women of the South have brought into American literature a unique mixture of domesticity and grotesquerie.

I think Ginsberg has done more harm to the craft that I honor and live by than anybody else by reducing it to a kind of mean that enables the most dubious practitioners to claim they are poets because they think, If the kind of thing Ginsberg does is poetry, I can do that.

I want a fever, in poetry: a fever, and tranquillity.

There ain't nothin' to dyin', really. You just get tired. You kind of drift away.

To have guilt you've got to earn guilt, but sometimes when you earn it, you don't feel the guilt you ought to have. And that's what The Firebombing is about.