James Dickey Quotes

#1. 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.

James Dickey

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

James Dickey

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

James Dickey

#4. 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

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

James Dickey

#6. In his mind he was always leaving, always going somewhere, always doing something else.

James Dickey

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

James Dickey

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

James Dickey

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

James Dickey

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

James Dickey

#11. She was the Judy Garland of American poetry.

James Dickey

#12. 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

#13. 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

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

James Dickey

#15. Find something only you can say

James Dickey

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

James Dickey

#17. Not a good man. Drinks too much in an uncreative way.

James Dickey

#18. 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.

James Dickey

#19. 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.

James Dickey

#20. With my foot on the water, I feel
The moon outside,
Take on the utmost of its power.
I rise and go out through the boats.
I set my broad soul upon silver,
On the skin of the sky, on the moonlight,
Stepping outward from the earth onto water
In quest of the miracle.

James Dickey

#21. 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.

James Dickey

#22. 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

James Dickey

#23. 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

#24. The body is the one thing you can't fake; it's just got to be there.

James Dickey

#25. 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.

James Dickey

#26. 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

#27. 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

#28. 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.

James Dickey

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

James Dickey

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

James Dickey

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

James Dickey

#32. 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

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

James Dickey

#34. 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.

James Dickey

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

James Dickey

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

James Dickey

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

James Dickey

#38. 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

#39. 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.

James Dickey

#40. 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

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

James Dickey

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

James Dickey

#43. 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

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

James Dickey

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

James Dickey

#46. 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.

James Dickey

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

James Dickey

#48. 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.

James Dickey

#49. I don't believe that a reviewer or a critic can really criticize well unless he can praise well.

James Dickey

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

James Dickey

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

James Dickey

#52. I believe that the American poet ought to be a tough son of a bitch. He sought to hold his own in this culture on his own terms and not compromise under any circumstances.

James Dickey