Kenneth Koch Quotes

Writing is immensely difficult. The short forms especially.

Prose on certain occasions can bear a great deal of poetry; on the other hand, poetry sinks and swoons under a moderate weight of prose.

Prose talks and poetry sings.

A novelist can get by on story, but the poet has nothing but the words.

I think writing a poem is like being a greyhound. Writing a novel is like being a mule. You go up one long row, then down another, and try not to look up too often to see how far you still have to go.

The short story seems like the best of all possible worlds. I do feel it is closer to writing poetry than to writing a novel, with its requirements of concentration and economy.

The unit of the poet is the word, the unit of the prose writer is the sentence.

I would recommend the short story form, which is a lot harder to write since you have to be so careful with words, until there is plenty of time to doodle through a novel.

Poetry is fascinating. As soon as it begins the poetry has changed the thing into something extra, and somehow prose can go over into poetry.

Poetry privileges music and is aesthetically more challenging. Prose privileges information and is emotionally more challenging.

I write line by line, by the sound and the weight and the music of the words.

When you are writing literary writing, you are communicating something subtextual with emotions and poetry. The prose has to have a voice; it's not just typing. It takes a while to get that voice.

Poetry and prose are of equal importance to me as a reader, and there doesn't seem to be much difference in my own writing.

The object of poetic activity is essentially language: whatever his beliefs and convictions, the poet is more concerned with words than with what these words designate.

I've always thought my poems told stories.

It should here be added that poetry habitually takes the form of verse.

I usually do at least a dozen drafts and progressively make more-conscious decisions. Because I've always believed stories are closer to poems than novels, I spend a lot of time on the story's larger rhythms, such as sentence and paragraph length, placement of flashbacks and dialogue.

Poetry has done enough when it charms, but prose must also convince.

Poetry taught me a great deal about language and images, but when it came to plotting, I was stumped. It's been very much a learn-by-doing thing for me.

I know I'm not a wordsmith. And I don't write poetry. Sometimes I think I should, because it's really helpful. But I always wanted to write novels.

Writing is not like acting, where you can pull these little stunts that create a particular effect. Words are all it is about, and the way you use words has to be individual and particular to you.

The future author is one who discovers that language, the exploration and manipulation of the resources of language, will serve him in winning through to his way.

I have felt great advances in my poetry, the main one being a growing victory over word nuances and a superfluity of adjectives.

To take a few nouns, and a few pronouns, and adverbs and adjectives, and put them together, ball them up, and throw them against the wall to make them bounce. That's what Norman Mailer did. That's what James Baldwin did, and Joan Didion did, and that's what I do - that's what I mean to do.

I wrote them kind of consecutively, starting with 'Holy,' and then '1950,' 'Talia,' 'Upper West Side,' 'Make My Bed,' and I was kind of like, 'This is it.' It felt right. It felt complete. It felt like a sentence. I really enjoyed making it.