James Dickey Quotes & Sayings

I want you to hear a new version of Dueling Banjos. Anyone else is welcome. — 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 see a continual history of defeat, frustration, poverty, alcoholism, drug addiction. The best poets of my generation are all suicides. — James Dickey

Poetry makes possible the deepest kind of personal possession of the world. — James Dickey

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

The death of a real deer at my hands was just a vaporous, remote presence that hovered over the figure of the paper deer forty-five yards away at target six of our archery range, as I tried to hit the heart-lung section marked out in heavy black. — James Dickey

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

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 be entitled to feel. — James Dickey

There are so many selves in everybody, and just to explore and exploit one is wrong, dead wrong, for the creative person. — James Dickey

I was inside out of myself and something was given a life-mission to say to me hungrily over and over and over your moves are exactly right for a few things in this world: we know you when you come Green Eyes, Green Eyes. — James Dickey

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

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

Not a good man. Drinks too much in an uncreative way. — James Dickey

Sliding is living antifriction. Or, no, sliding is living by antifriction. It is finding a modest thing you can do, and then greasing that thing. On both sides. It is grooving with comfort. — James Dickey

With my foot on the water, I feel
The moon outside,
Take on the utmost of its power.
I rise and go out through the boats.
I set my broad soul upon silver,
On the skin of the sky, on the moonlight,
Stepping outward from the earth onto water
In quest of the miracle. — James Dickey

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. — James Dickey

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. — James Dickey

I believe that the American poet ought to be a tough son of a bitch. He sought to hold his own in this culture on his own terms and not compromise under any circumstances. — James Dickey

I go out on the side of a hill, maybe hunting deer, and sit there and see the shadow of night coming over the hill, and I can swear to you there is a part of me that is absolutely untouched by anything civilized. There's a part of me that has never heard of a telephone. — James Dickey

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. — James Dickey

To be precise and reckless: that is the consummation devoutly to be wished. — James Dickey

I want a fever, in poetry: a fever, and tranquillity. — James Dickey

Poetry is a hazardous occupation, very hazardous. There may be bad things in there inside you that maybe you can't handle. — James Dickey

I don't believe that a reviewer or a critic can really criticize well unless he can praise well. — James Dickey

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

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. — James Dickey

I had the feeling that if it were perfectly quiet, if I could hear nothing, I would never wake up. Something in the world had to pull me back, for every night I went down deep, and if I had any sensation during sleep, it was of going deeper and deeper, trying to reach a point, a line or border. — James Dickey

I want you all to stand; will you do that for me, please? — James Dickey

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

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. — James Dickey

There ain't nothin' to dyin', really. You just get tired. You kind of drift away. — James Dickey

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 that ever was in the whole universe — James Dickey

Up telephone poles,
Which rear, half out of leavage
As though they would shriek
Like things smothered by their own
Green, mindless, unkillable ghosts.
In Georgia, the legend says
That you must close your windows
At night to keep it out of the house
The glass is tinged with green, even so,
As the tendrils crawl over the fields.
The night the Kudzu has
Your pasture, you sleep like the dead.
Silence has grown oriental
And you cannot step upon the ground ...
ALL: Kudzu by James Dickey — James Dickey

A poet is someone who stands outside in the rain hoping to be struck by lightning. — James Dickey

I feel very happy to see the sun come up every day. I feel happy to be around ... I like to take this day- any day-and go to town with it. — James Dickey

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. — James Dickey

If it were thought that anything I wrote was influenced by Robert Frost, I would take that particular piece of mine,
shred it, and flush it down the toilet, hoping not to clog the pipes. — James Dickey

If you write well, you don't have to dress funny. — James Dickey

I need about one hundred fifty drafts of a poem to get it right, and fifty more to make it sound spontaneous. — James Dickey

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 it was not seeing, really. For once it was not just seeing. It was beholding. I beheld the river in its icy pit of brightness, in its far-below sound and indifference, in its large coil and tiny points and flashes of the moon, in its long sinuous form, in its uncomprehending consequence. — James Dickey

To live a very long time ... is supposed to be the desired object of all human life. But it is not. The main thing is to ride the flood tide ... How glorious it is to create! For those few moments of a lifetime when the stream is running full and deep: those are the justification for everything. — James Dickey

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. — James Dickey

The women of the South have brought into American literature a unique mixture of domesticity and grotesquerie. — James Dickey

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

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

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

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. — James Dickey

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, or a hundred variations on a single line sometimes. I work on the process of refining low-grade ore. I get maybe a couple of nu ggets of gold out of 50 tons of dirt. It is tough for me. No, I am not inspired. — James Dickey

The man turned away from Bobby, and the finality with which he did it made me glance at Bobby to see if he had disappeared as a result. — 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 his tree, and that the people whom we are pleased to call poets are only those who have felt the need and contrived the means to release this spirit from its prison — James Dickey

There is no whole truth, but this is what we have,
And it goes on
Beyond impact, beyond reach, beyond recall ... — James Dickey

Find something only you can say — James Dickey

Find out what you do best, and then don't do it. — 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 know it. There's never any final certainty about what you do. Your opinion of your own work fluctuates wildly. Under the right circumstances you can pick up something that you've written and approve of it; you'll think it's good and that nobody could have done exactly the same thing. Under different circumstances, you'll look at exactly the same poem and say, "My Lord, isn't that boring." The most important thing is to be excited about what you are doing and to be working on something that you think will be the greatest thing that ever was. One of the difficulties in writing poetry is to maintain your sense of excitement and discovery about what you write. — James Dickey

In his mind he was always leaving, always going somewhere, always doing something else. — James Dickey

She was the Judy Garland of American poetry. — James Dickey

I was standing in the most absolute aloneness that I had ever been given. — James Dickey