James Dickey Quotes

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

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

A poet is someone who stands outside in the rain hoping to be struck by lightning.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

If it were thought that anything I wrote was influenced by Robert Frost, I would take that particular piece of mine, shred it, and flush it down the toilet, hoping not to clog the pipes.

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

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

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

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.

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.

Those that are huntedKnow this as their life,Their reward: to walkUnder such trees in full knowledgeOf what is in glory above them,And to feel no fear.

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

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

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

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

In his mind he was always leaving, always going somewhere, always doing something else.

Flight is the only true sensation that men have achieved in modern history.