Kenneth Koch Quotes

• When you finish a poem, it clicks shut like the top of a jewel box, but prose is endless. I haven’t experienced an awful lot of clicking shut!

  Kenneth Koch

• The subject matter of the stories on the surface… there seem to be a number of stories about travel.

  Kenneth Koch

• Some of the French surrealists at the beginning of the war had come over to New York and they brought out this magazine. It was a big, glossy magazine full of surrealist things.

  Kenneth Koch

• Politics is there the way men and women are there, the way the Atlantic Ocean is there. Sometimes I’ve written about politics specifically, I mean about politics as it’s understood on television and in newspapers.

  Kenneth Koch

• Picasso said once when being interviewed that one should not be one’s own connoisseur.

  Kenneth Koch

• Once I start writing about something, it goes off rather fast, and sometimes details which might be interesting such as what the room looked like or what somebody said that was not exactly on the same subject tend to get lost.

  Kenneth Koch

• Maybe there are three or four really good poets in a generation.

  Kenneth Koch

• It’s enormously cheering to get a good review by someone who seems to understand your work.

  Kenneth Koch

• It’s a well known thing that ordinary perceptions can have a strange aspect when one is travelling.

  Kenneth Koch

• It takes a long time to publish a book.

  Kenneth Koch

• It seems everything is so full of possibilities one can hardly take it all in.

  Kenneth Koch

• I’ve had trouble with criticism, I guess. It’s hard to know what role criticism plays in either encouraging poets or in getting other people to read them.

  Kenneth Koch

• I’m a writer who likes to be influenced.

  Kenneth Koch

• I wonder if I ever thought of an ideal reader… I guess when I was in my 20s and in New York and maybe even in my early 30s, I would write for my wife Janice… mainly for my poet friends and my wife, who was very smart about poetry.

  Kenneth Koch

• I was influenced by surrealist poetry and painting as were thousands of other people, and it seems to me to have become a part of the way I write, but it’s not.

  Kenneth Koch

• I was excited by what my painter friends were doing, and they seemed to be interested in our poetry too, and that was a wonderful little, fizzy sort of world.

  Kenneth Koch

• I was born in Cincinnati, Ohio. My family was not nationally known as being a literary family, though my mother and my mother’s side of the family in general were interested in literature.

  Kenneth Koch

• I never thought of myself as a New York poet or as an American poet.

  Kenneth Koch

• I love painting and music, of course. I don’t know nearly as much about them as I know about poetry. I’ve certainly been influenced by fiction. I was overwhelmed by War and Peace when I read it, and I didn’t read it until I was in my late 20s.

  Kenneth Koch

• I got married, other people went off. We had sort of another public-we were our entire readership for many years, and we were very excited by each other.

  Kenneth Koch

Kenneth Koch (24)

Birth:	27th February, 1925
Death:	6th July, 2002
Nationality:	American
Profession:	Playwright, Poet, Professor

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Today's Anniversary - 4th December

Births

• 1944 - Dennis Wilson
• 1950 - Steven Jay Bernstein
• 1927 - William Labov
• 1934 - Winston Conrad Martindale
• 1893 - Sir Herbert Edward Read

Deaths

• 1649 - William Drummond
• 1923 - Maurice Barres
• 1945 - Thomas Hunt Morgan
• 1952 - Karen Horney
• 1679 - Thomas Hobbes