James Dickey Quotes
"You are bound, my hunch is, to make it just fine."
- James Dickey
"William Packard surely must be one of the great editors of our time."
- James Dickey
(Related: Time, Editors)
"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
(Related: Fire, Wrong)
"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
(Related: Guilt)
"To be precise and reckless: that is the consummation devoutly to be wished."
- James Dickey
"There ain't nothin' to dyin', really. You just get tired. You kind of drift away."
- James Dickey
"The true feeling of sex is that of a deep intimacy, but above all of a deep complicity."
- James Dickey
(Related: Sex, Deep, Feeling, Intimacy)
"A poet is someone who stands outside in the rain hoping to be struck by lightning."
- James Dickey
(Related: Rain)
"I want you to hear a new version of Dueling Banjos. Anyone else is welcome."
- James Dickey
(Related: Want)
"I want you all to stand; will you do that for me, please?"
- James Dickey
(Related: Want, Will)
"I want a fever, in poetry: a fever, and tranquillity."
- James Dickey
(Related: Want)
"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
(Related: Poetry, Harm, Honor, Poets)
"He can't imagine the result of the mission because he never saw it."
- James Dickey
(Related: Mission, Result)
"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
(Related: Being, Feeling, Mind, State)
"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
(Related: War, Being, Destruction)
"The New York Quarterly is an amazing, intelligent, crazy, creative, strange, and indispensable magazine."
- James Dickey