Kenneth Koch Quotes

You aren't just the age you are. You are all the ages you ever have been!

As for political poetry, as it's usually defined, it seems there's very little good political poetry.

I'm a writer who likes to be influenced.

Picasso said once when being interviewed that one should not be one's own connoisseur.

When you finish a poem, it clicks shut like the top of a jewel box, but prose is endless. I haven't experienced an awful lot of clicking shut!

Certainly, it seems true enough that there's a good deal of irony in the world... I mean, if you live in a world full of politicians and advertising, there's obviously a lot of deception.

I've had trouble with criticism, I guess. It's hard to know what role criticism plays in either encouraging poets or in getting other people to read them.

Summer in the trees! “It is time to strangle several bad poets.

I got married, other people went off. We had sort of another public-we were our entire readership for many years, and we were very excited by each other.

One trouble with a kind of falsely therapeutic and always reassuring attitude that it is easy to fall into with old people, is the tendency to be satisfied with too little.

Poetry is a deliberate attempt to make language suggestive and imprecise.

I was born in Cincinnati, Ohio. My family was not nationally known as being a literary family, though my mother and my mother's side of the family in general were interested in literature.

Also, I liked John Cage's music. I liked it for its craziness, the use of silence, the boldness-anything to get me away from writing about.. I don't know what academic poets write about.

Maybe there are three or four really good poets in a generation.

I don't think the nature of my poetry is satirical or even ironic, I think it's essentially lyrical but again I don't know if it's my position to say what my poetry is like.

I never thought of myself as a New York poet or as an American poet.

You can't be too influenced by a great poet. You simply have to live through it.

It's a well known thing that ordinary perceptions can have a strange aspect when one is travelling.

It takes a long time to publish a book.

It seems everything is so full of possibilities one can hardly take it all in.

All poetry comes from repetition.

Poetry, which is written while no one is looking, is meant to be looked at for all time.

I certainly have the feeling that I'm the same person even though I've changed a great deal.

If you want to know how much I love and care for you, count the waves.

It's enormously cheering to get a good review by someone who seems to understand your work.

The subject matter of the stories on the surface... there seem to be a number of stories about travel.

One day the Nouns were clustered in the street. An Adjective walked by, with her dark beauty. The Nouns were struck, moved, changed. The next day a Verb drove up, and created the Sentence.

When you get an idea, go and write. Don't waste it in conversation.

One trouble with a kind of falsely therapeutic and always reassuring attitude that it is easy to fall into with old people is the tendency to be satisfied with too little.

AESTHETICS OF INTEGRITYFor every star in the skySomeone is holding his ground.