James Dickey Quotes

31 quotes in 441 categories

• Find something only you can say
• 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,…
• If you write well, you don't have to dress funny.
• Yet technique matters, even so. God uses it, for a buffalo is not a leopard.
• Flight is the only truly new sensation than men have achieved in modern history.
• 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.
• 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…
• 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…
• The women of the South have brought into American literature a unique mixture of domesticity and grotesquerie.
• The body is the one thing you can't fake; it's just got to be there.
• I don’t believe that a reviewer or a critic can really criticize well unless he can praise well.
• The true feeling of sex is that of a deep intimacy, but above all of a deep complicity....
• 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.
• 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…
• I want a fever, in poetry: a fever, and tranquillity.
• The New York Quarterly is an amazing, intelligent, crazy, creative, strange, and indispensable magazine.
• He can't imagine the result of the mission because he never saw it.
• 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…
• To be precise and reckless: that is the consummation devoutly to be wished.
• 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…

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