Kenneth Koch Quotes

Certainly, it seems true enough that there's a good deal of irony in the world... I mean, if you live in a world full of politicians and advertising, there's obviously a lot of deception.
Kenneth Koch

Good, Live, True

I certainly have the feeling that I'm the same person even though I've changed a great deal.
Kenneth Koch

Great, Feeling, Person

As for political poetry, as it's usually defined, it seems there's very little good political poetry.
Kenneth Koch

Good, Poetry, Political

As I look over my work, I mean every time I look over my early work, I see, yes, I could do that then and then I could do that and that... That may be the hardest thing for a writer, at least for a poet, to tell what the identity of his work is.
Kenneth Koch

Work, Time, Mean

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

Another, Off, Married

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

Love, Music, Peace

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

Thought, American, York

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

Family, Mother, Born

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

Poetry, Friends, Wonderful

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

Poetry, Become, Write

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

Poetry, Smart, Wife

I'm a writer who likes to be influenced.
Kenneth Koch

Writer, Likes, Influenced

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

Hard, Getting, Read

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

Everything, Seems, Full

It takes a long time to publish a book.
Kenneth Koch

Time, Long, Book

It's a well known thing that ordinary perceptions can have a strange aspect when one is travelling.
Kenneth Koch

Strange, Known, Ordinary

It's enormously cheering to get a good review by someone who seems to understand your work.
Kenneth Koch

Work, Good, Someone

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

Good, Three, Generation

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

Writing, Lost, Same

Picasso said once when being interviewed that one should not be one's own connoisseur.
Kenneth Koch

Said, Once, Picasso

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

Politics, Women, Men

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

War, Big, Beginning

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

Travel, Matter, Number

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

Top, Shut, Finish

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Biography

Nationality: American

Type: Poet

Born: February 27, 1925

Died: July 6, 2002

Links

Find on Amazon: Kenneth Koch

Cite this Page: Citation

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