James Dickey Quotes

Quotes about:

• 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

  Writing, Realizing, Love Poetry

  50 Copy quote

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

  James Dickey

  Rain, Poetry, Lightning

  "Biography/ Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

  26 Copy quote

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

  James Dickey

  Sound, Needs, Fifty

  5 Copy quote

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

  James Dickey

  Self, Creative, Persons

  James Dickey (1983). “Night Hurdling: Poems, Essays, Conversations, Commencements, and Afterwords”, Columbia [S.C.] : Bruccoli Clark

  18 Copy quote

• 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

  Couple, Writing, Trying

  10 Copy quote

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

  James Dickey

  World, Kind, Possession

  15 Copy quote

• 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

  Moon, Views, Rivers

  James Dickey (2008). “Deliverance”, p.171, Delta

  15 Copy quote

• 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

  Art, Lying, Nerves

  18 Copy quote

• Find out what you do best, and then don't do it.

  James Dickey

  16 Copy quote

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

  James Dickey

  Want, Failing, Willing

  James Dickey (2011). “James Dickey: The Selected Poems”, p.14, Wesleyan University Press

  9 Copy quote

• 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

  War, Modern, Destruction

  14 Copy quote

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

  James Dickey

  Believe, Praise, Criticize

  17 Copy quote

• Then you develop a kind of critical sense about what you write. You can tell when something is good, but it would be just as good in somebody else's work too. You want to hold out for those things only you can say.

  James Dickey

  Inspirational, Life, Beautiful

  "Night Hurdling: Poems, Essays, Conversations, Commencements, and Afterwords".

  18 Copy quote

• To be precise and reckless: that is the consummation devoutly to be wished.

  James Dickey

  Reckless, Precise

  James Dickey (1984). “Sorties”, p.69, LSU Press

  17 Copy quote

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

  James Dickey

  Occupation, May, Poetry Is

  James Dickey, Ronald Baughman (1989). “The voiced connections of James Dickey: interviews and conversations”, Univ of South Carolina Pr

  5 Copy quote

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

  James Dickey

  Tired, Kind

  10 Copy quote

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

  James Dickey

  Men, Flying, Pilots

  21 Copy quote

• 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

  Towns, Sun, Come Up

  9 Copy quote

• 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

  Feelings, Mind, Peculiar

  James Dickey (1984). “Self-interviews”, p.139, LSU Press

  9 Copy quote

• 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

  Frost, Pieces, Toilets

  7 Copy quote

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

  James Dickey

  Writing, Dresses, Wells

  8 Copy quote

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

  James Dickey

  Unique, Literature, Mixtures

  12 Copy quote

• 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

  Life, Running, Long

  10 Copy quote

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

  James Dickey

  Sex, Feelings, Intimacy

  James Dickey (1984). “Sorties”, p.95, LSU Press

  21 Copy quote

• 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

  Guilt, Sometimes, Feels

  James Dickey (1972). “Self-interviews”

  12 Copy quote

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