Quotes by James Dickey

• She was the Judy Garland of American poetry.
• You are bound, my hunch is, to make it just fine.
• William Packard surely must be one of the great editors of our time.
• 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.
• 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.
• To be precise and reckless: that is the consummation devoutly to be wished.
• There ain't nothin' to dyin', really. You just get tired. You kind of drift away.
• The true feeling of sex is that of a deep intimacy, but above all of a deep complicity.
• A poet is someone who stands outside in the rain hoping to be struck by lightning.
• I want you to hear a new version of Dueling Banjos. Anyone else is welcome.
• I want you all to stand; will you do that for me, please?
• I want a fever, in poetry: a fever, and tranquillity.
• 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.
• He can't imagine the result of the mission because he never saw it.
• 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.
• 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.
• The New York Quarterly is an amazing, intelligent, crazy, creative, strange, and indispensable magazine.