JAMES DICKEY

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.

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

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.

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.

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

She was the Judy Garland of American poetry.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

Then you develop a kind of critical sense about what you write. You can tell when something is good, but it would be just as good in somebody else's work too. You want to hold out for those things only you can say.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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