Top 35 James Dickey Quotes (2024 Update)

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

— James Dickey

2. “The body is the one thing you can’t fake; it’s just got to be there.”

— James Dickey

3. “Find something only you can say.”

— James Dickey

4. “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

5. “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

6. “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

7. “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

8. “Flight is the only truly new sensation than men have achieved in modern history.”

— James Dickey

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

— James Dickey

10. “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

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

— James Dickey

12. “To be precise and reckless: that is the consummation devoutly to be wished.”

— James Dickey

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

— James Dickey

14. “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

15. “After four hours I passed slowly from the country of ‘nine-fingered people and prepare to meet thy God’ into the drive-ins and motels and Homes of the Whopper but all I could see was the river.”

— James Dickey

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

— James Dickey

17. “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

18. “Poetry makes possible the deepest kind of personal possession of the world.”

— James Dickey

19. “I want a fever, in poetry: a fever, and tranquillity.”

— James Dickey

20. “I opened my eyes and saw the dark in all its original color.”

— James Dickey

21. “The river and everything I remembered about it became a possession to me, a personal, private possession, as nothing else in my life ever had. Now it ran nowhere but in my head, but there it ran as though immortally. I could feel it – I can feel it – on different places on my body... In me it still is, and will be until I die, green, rocky, deep, fast, slow, and beautiful beyond reality.”

— James Dickey

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

— James Dickey

23. “If I were going to tell one of my sons how to possess the world, I would simply bring him into my house, show him that solid wall of books, and say to him: ’the secret is in there somewhere, and even if you never find out what it is, you will still have come closer.”

— James Dickey

24. “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

25. “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

26. “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

27. “What I want is to be willing to fail rather than stagnate.”

— James Dickey

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

— James Dickey

29. “Not a good man. Drinks too much in an uncreative way.”

— James Dickey

30. “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

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

— James Dickey

32. “In his mind he was always leaving, always going somewhere, always doing something else.”

— James Dickey

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

— James Dickey

34. “My move my throat my wildest loves, the eyes behind my eyes. Instead I left Him, though he followed me right to the end.”

— James Dickey

35. “You are bound, my hunch is, to make it just fine.”

— James Dickey

36. “Poetry is a hazardous occupation, very hazardous. There may be bad things in there inside you that maybe you can’t handle.”

— James Dickey

37. “Find out what you do best, and then don’t do it.”

— James Dickey

38. “If you write well, you don’t have to dress funny.”

— James Dickey

39. “He can’t imagine the result of the mission because he never saw it.”

— James Dickey