Kenneth Koch Quotes

33 quotes in 468 categories

• The subject matter of the stories on the surface... there seem to be a number of stories about travel.
• I'm a writer who likes to be influenced.
• 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…
• 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…
• Poetry, which is written while no one is looking, is meant to be looked at for all time.
• 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…
• Summer in the trees! “It is time to strangle several bad poets.
• I got married, other people went off. We had sort of another public-we were our entire readership for many years, and we were very excited…
• 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…
• It seems everything is so full of possibilities one can hardly take it all in.
• 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…
• It's a well known thing that ordinary perceptions can have a strange aspect when one is travelling.
• 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…
• You aren't just the age you are. You are all the ages you ever have been!
• I never thought of myself as a New York poet or as an American poet.
• If you want to know how much I love and care for you, count the waves.
• Also, I liked John Cage's music. I liked it for its craziness, the use of silence, the boldness-anything to get me away from writing about..…
• I was born in Cincinnati, Ohio. My family was not nationally known as being a literary family, though my mother and my mother's side of…
• One trouble with a kind of falsely therapeutic and always reassuring attitude that it is easy to fall into with old people, is the tendency…
• 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…

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