Kenneth Koch Quotes

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

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

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

I thought, 'There are a lot of poets who have the courage to look into the abyss, but there are very few who have the courage to look happiness in the face and write about it,' which is what I wanted to be able to do.

I'm a writer who likes to be influenced.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

All poetry comes from repetition.

This rose became a bandanna, which became a house, which became infused with all passion, which became a hideaway, which became yes I would like to have dinner, which became hands, which became lands, shores, beaches, natives on the stones, staring and wild beasts in the trees, chasing the hats of lost hunters, and all this deserves a tone.

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!

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

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.

It takes a long time to publish a book.

I love painting and music, of course. I don't know nearly as much about them as I know about poetry. I've certainly been influenced by fiction. I was overwhelmed by War and Peace when I read it, and I didn't read it until I was in my late 20s.

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

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

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

As I look over my work, I mean every time I look over my early work, I see, yes, I could do that then and then I could do that and that... That may be the hardest thing for a writer, at least for a poet, to tell what the identity of his work is.

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.

Politics is there the way men and women are there, the way the Atlantic Ocean is there. Sometimes I've written about politics specifically, I mean about politics as it's understood on television and in newspapers.