James Dickey Quotes - Page 2

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.