Best 37 quotes of James Dickey on MyQuotes

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

I go out on the side of a hill, maybe hunting deer, and sit there and see the shadow of night coming over the hill, and I can swear to you there is a part of me that is absolutely untouched by anything civilized. There's a part of me that has never heard of a telephone.

The death of a real deer at my hands was just a vaporous, remote presence that hovered over the figure of the paper deer forty-five yards away at target six of our archery range, as I tried to hit the heart-lung section marked out in heavy black.

The Heaven of Animals Here they are. The soft eyes open. If they have lived in a wood It is a wood. If they have lived on plains It is grass rolling Under their feet forever. Having no souls, they have come, Anyway, beyond their knowing. Their instincts wholly bloom And they rise. The soft eyes open. To match them, the landscape flowers, Outdoing, desperately Outdoing what is required: The richest wood, The deepest field. For some of these, It could not be the place It is, without blood. These hunt, as they have done, But with claws and teeth grown perfect, More deadly than they can believe. They stalk more silently, And crouch on the limbs of trees, And their descent Upon the bright backs of their prey May take years In a sovereign floating of joy. And those that are hunted Know this as their life, Their reward: to walk Under such trees in full knowledge Of what is in glory above them, And to feel no fear, But acceptance, compliance. Fulfilling themselves without pain At the cycle’s center, They tremble, they walk Under the tree, They fall, they are torn, They rise, they walk again.

... Up telephone poles, Which rear, half out of leavage As though they would shriek Like things smothered by their own Green, mindless, unkillable ghosts. In Georgia, the legend says That you must close your windows At night to keep it out of the house The glass is tinged with green, even so, As the tendrils crawl over the fields. The night the Kudzu has Your pasture, you sleep like the dead. Silence has grown oriental And you cannot step upon the ground... ALL: Kudzu by James Dickey