James Dickey Quotes

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

  James Dickey

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

  James Dickey

• 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

• 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

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

  James Dickey

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

  James Dickey

• The true feeling of s*x is that of a deep intimacy, but above all of a deep complicity.

  James Dickey

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

  James Dickey

• 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

• She was the Judy Garland of American poetry.

  James Dickey

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

  James Dickey

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

  James Dickey

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

  James Dickey

• 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

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

  James Dickey

• 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

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

  James Dickey

James Dickey (17)

Birth:	2nd February, 1923
Death:	19th January, 1997
Nationality:	American
Profession:	Novelist, Poet, Professor

About

James Lafayette Dickey was born in Atlanta, Georgia, USA. He was an American poet and novelist. He was appointed the eighteenth United States Poet Laureate in 1966. He earned a BA degree from Vanderbilt University in 1949. He earned an MA degree from Vanderbilt University in 1950. He taught as an instructor of English at Rice University in Houston, Texas in 1950. He served as a professor of English at the University of South Carolina. He wrote several novels include: Deliverance, Alnilam, and To The White Sea. He wrote several poetries include: Helmets, Buckdancer's Choice(National Book Award for Poetry), Babel to Byzantium, The Zodiac, The Central Motion, and The Whole Motion.

Related Authors

• Clive James
• Dorris Alexander Brown
• Dorothy Dunnett
• August Strindberg
• Wright Morris
• C. P. Snow
• Zelda Fitzgerald
• Dave Eggers
• Nate Kenyon
• Dave Barry

Advertisement

Today's Anniversary - 26th March

Births

• 1911 - Tennessee Williams
• 1953 - Lincoln Chafee
• 1957 - Leeza Gibbons
• 1949 - Vicki Lawrence
• 1966 - Michael Imperioli

Deaths

• 1838 - William Henry Ashley
• 1943 - Ben Lindsey
• 1959 - Raymond Chandler
• 1892 - Walt Whitman
• 1923 - Sarah Bernhardt