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

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

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

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

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

She was the Judy Garland of American poetry.
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

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


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

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

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

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

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