70 Quotes by James Dickey

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

All day I climb myself bowlegged up those damned poles, rooster-heeled, in all kinds of weather

And I to my motorcycle Parked like the soul of the junkyard Restored, a bicycle fleshed With power, and tore off Up Highway 106 continually Drunk on the wind in my mouth Wringing the handlebar for speed Wild to be wreckage forever

Find something only you can say.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.