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I need about one hundred fifty drafts of a poem to get it right, and fifty more to make it sound spontaneous.

James Dickey

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James Dickey
Age: 73 †
Born: 1923
Born: February 2
Died: 1997
Died: January 19
Novelist
Poet
Screenwriter
Writer
Atlanta
Georgia
James Lafayette Dickey
Sound
Need
Right
Needs
Drafts
Make
Spontaneous
Poem
Fifty
Hundred

More quotes by James Dickey

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The women of the South have brought into American literature a unique mixture of domesticity and grotesquerie.
James Dickey
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I want you to hear a new version of Dueling Banjos. Anyone else is welcome.
James Dickey
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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.
James Dickey
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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.
James Dickey
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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
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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.
James Dickey
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Poetry is a hazardous occupation, very hazardous. There may be bad things in there inside you that maybe you can't handle.
James Dickey
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Poetry makes possible the deepest kind of personal possession of the world.
James Dickey
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The New York Quarterly is an amazing, intelligent, crazy, creative, strange, and indispensable magazine.
James Dickey
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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
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I once had the nerve to ask Picasso the question, 'What is art?' He answered, 'Art is a lie which makes us see the truth.
James Dickey
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There are so many selves in everybody, and just to explore and exploit one is wrong, dead wrong, for the creative person.
James Dickey
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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
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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.
James Dickey
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It takes an awful lot of time for me to write anything. I have endless drafts, one after another and I try out 50, 75, or a hundred variations on a single line sometimes. I work on the process of refining low-grade ore. I get maybe a couple of nu ggets of gold out of 50 tons of dirt. It is tough for me. No, I am not inspired.
James Dickey
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Flight is the only truly new sensation than men have achieved in modern history.
James Dickey
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A poet is someone who stands outside in the rain hoping to be struck by lightning.
James Dickey
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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.
James Dickey