Quotes by James Dickey - Page 1

She was the Judy Garland of American poetry.
James Dickey / Poet
Garland
Judy
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Find out what you do best, and then don't do it.
James Dickey / Poet
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If you write well, you don't have to dress funny.
James Dickey / Poet
Dresses
Wells
Writing
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You are bound, my hunch is, to make it just fine.
James Dickey / Poet
Bounds
Fine
Hunches
Bound
Hunch
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I want a fever, in poetry: a fever, and tranquillity.
James Dickey / Poet
Fever
Quiet
Tranquillity
Want
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I want you all to stand; will you do that for me, please?
James Dickey / Poet
Please
Me Stand Will
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What I want is to be willing to fail rather than stagnate.
James Dickey / Poet
Failing
Want
Willing
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He can't imagine the result of the mission because he never saw it.
James Dickey / Poet
Imagine
Results
Saws
Mission
Result
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William Packard surely must be one of the great editors of our time.
James Dickey / Poet
Editors
Our Time
Time Great Must
William
Packard
Surely
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The body is the one thing you can't fake; it's just got to be there.
James Dickey / Poet
Body
Fake
One Thing
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Poetry makes possible the deepest kind of personal possession of the world.
James Dickey / Poet
Kind
Possession
World
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To be precise and reckless: that is the consummation devoutly to be wished.
James Dickey / Poet
Precise
Reckless
Devoutly
Wished
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I want you to hear a new version of Dueling Banjos. Anyone else is welcome.
James Dickey / Poet
Dueling
Want
Welcome
Anyone Else
Version
Hear
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Yet technique matters, even so. God uses it, for a buffalo is not a leopard.
James Dickey / Poet
Leopards
Technique
Writing
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Flight is the only truly new sensation than men have achieved in modern history.
James Dickey / Poet
Men
Flying
Pilots
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There ain't nothin' to dyin', really. You just get tired. You kind of drift away.
James Dickey / Poet
Kind
Tired
Drift
Nothin
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A poet is someone who stands outside in the rain hoping to be struck by lightning.
James Dickey / Poet
Poetry
Lightning
Poet
Rain
Who
Someone
Hoping
Outside
Stands
Struck
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The true feeling of sex is that of a deep intimacy, but above all of a deep complicity.
James Dickey / Poet
Complicity
Feelings
Intimacy
Sex
Above
True Feeling
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I don’t believe that a reviewer or a critic can really criticize well unless he can praise well.
James Dickey / Poet
Believe
Criticize
Praise
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The New York Quarterly is an amazing, intelligent, crazy, creative, strange, and indispensable magazine.
James Dickey / Poet
New York
Crazy
Indispensable
Intelligent
Strange
Magazine
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I need about one hundred fifty drafts of a poem to get it right, and fifty more to make it sound spontaneous.
James Dickey / Poet
Fifty
Needs
Sound
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The women of the South have brought into American literature a unique mixture of domesticity and grotesquerie.
James Dickey / Poet
Literature
Mixtures
Unique
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There are so many selves in everybody, and just to explore and exploit one is wrong, dead wrong, for the creative person.
James Dickey / Poet
Creative
Persons
Self
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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 / Poet
Art
Lying
Nerves
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Poetry is a hazardous occupation, very hazardous. There may be bad things in there inside you that maybe you can't handle.
James Dickey / Poet
May
Occupation
Poetry Is
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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 / Poet
Able
Giving
Thinking
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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 / Poet
War
Destruction
Miles
Modern
Modern War
Caused
Human Being
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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 / Poet
Come Up
Sun
Towns
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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 / Poet
No Fear
Rewards
Tree
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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 / Poet
Feels
Guilt
Ought
Sometimes
Earn
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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 / Poet
Deprived
Detachment
Entitled
Feelings
Mind
Ought
Peculiar
Human Being
Produces
Sentence
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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 / Poet
Love Poetry
Realizing
Writing
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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 / Poet
Fire
Flash
Sometimes
Way
Altitude
Depending
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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.
James Dickey / Poet
Lightning
Lucky
Storm
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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.
James Dickey / Poet
Frost
Pieces
Toilets
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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.
James Dickey / Poet
Inspirational
Life
Beautiful
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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.
James Dickey / Poet
Artist
Frustration
Suicide
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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 / Poet
Dubious
Harm
Honor
Mean
Reducing
Thinking
Anybody Else
Claim
Craft
Enables
Poets
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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 / Poet
Life
Running
Long
Tides
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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 / Poet
Couple
Trying
Writing
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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 / Poet
Moon
Rivers
Views
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James Dickey Quotes - Page 1

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