James Dickey famous 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
-- James Dickey

#Writing #Realizing #Love Poetry

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

#Men #Aviation #Flight

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

#Believe #Praise #Criticize

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

#Rain #Poetry #Lightning

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

#Unique #Literature #Mixtures

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.
-- James Dickey

#Moon #Rivers #Views

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.
-- James Dickey

#Guilt #Sometimes #Feels

Find something only you can say
-- James Dickey

#Beautiful

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.
-- James Dickey

#Art #Lying #Nerves

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

#Writing #Dresses #Wells

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

#Reckless

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

#Saws #Imagine #Results

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.
-- James Dickey

#Mean #Thinking #Honor

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.
-- James Dickey

#Thinking #Giving #Able

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

#Editors

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.
-- James Dickey

#Fire #Way #Sometimes

To live a very long time... is supposed to be the desired object of all human life. But it is not. The main thing is to ride the flood tide... How glorious it is to create! For those few moments of a lifetime when the stream is running full and deep: those are the justification for everything.
-- James Dickey

#Life #Running #Long

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

#Hunches #Fine

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.
-- James Dickey

#Feelings #Mind #Peculiar

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.
-- James Dickey

#Towns #Sun #Come Up

I want a fever, in poetry: a fever, and tranquillity.
-- James Dickey

#Fever #Want #Quiet

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.
-- James Dickey

#War #Modern #Destruction

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.
-- James Dickey

#Tree #Rewards #No Fear

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.
-- James Dickey

#Couple #Writing #Trying

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

#Writing #Technique #Leopards

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

#Fake #Body

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

#Sex #Feelings #Intimacy

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

#Tired #Kind

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

#Dueling #Want #Welcome

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

#New York #Crazy #Intelligent