Quotes from James Dickey

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

Flight is the only true sensation that men have achieved in modern history.

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

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.

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

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

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.