James Dickey Quotations

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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