James Dickey

What I want is to be willing to fail rather than stagnate.

— James Dickey

I once had the nerve to ask Picasso the question, 'What is art?' He answered, 'Art is a lie which makes us…

— James Dickey

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

— James Dickey

“If I were going to tell one of my sons how to possess the world, I would simply bring him into my…

— James Dickey

What a view, i said again. The river was blank and mindless with beauty. It was the most glorious thing I have…

— James Dickey

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

— James Dickey

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

— James Dickey

I do think the author ought to be able to give a good reason for the way things are in his poem.…

— James Dickey

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

— James Dickey

Find something only you can say

— James Dickey

I think Ginsberg has done more harm to the craft that I honor and live by than anybody else by reducing it…

— James Dickey

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

— James Dickey

We've always had a tradition in America of hounding our artists to death. Look at the list of our great artists, you…

— James Dickey

A poet trains himself to stand out in a storm and be struck by lightning. If he is lucky enough to be…

— James Dickey

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

— James Dickey

She was the Judy Garland of American poetry.

— James Dickey

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

— James Dickey

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

— James Dickey

“With the stone question In the heads of Greek statues Who ask where their arms And legs and the tips of their…

— James Dickey

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

— James Dickey

“You never know that. I don't know it; Robert Lowell doesn't know it; John Berryman didn't know it; and Shakespeare probably didn't…

— James Dickey

“... Up telephone poles, Which rear, half out of leavage As though they would shriek Like things smothered by their own Green,…

— James Dickey

“I had begun to suspect, however, that there is a poet—or a kind of poet—buried in every human being like Ariel in…

— James Dickey

I feel very happy to see the sun come up every day. I feel happy to be around. ... I like to…

— James Dickey

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

— James Dickey