James Dickey Quotes

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

She was the Judy Garland of American poetry.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

My move my throat my wildest loves, the eyes behind my eyes. Instead I left Him, though he followed me right to the end.

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

Find something only you can say

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

I want you to hear a new version of Dueling Banjos. Anyone else is welcome.

Poetry makes possible the deepest kind of personal possession of the world.