Kenneth Koch quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Kenneth Koch

Kenneth Koch Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Kenneth Koch on Wise Famous Quotes.

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

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

The uniform of the gladdest malt is its sureness.

Poetry, which is written while no one is looking, is meant to be looked at for all time.

AESTHETICS OF THE AESTHETICIAN
What is the aesthetician
But a mule hitched to the times?

It takes a long time to publish a book.

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

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

I probably misunderstand misunderstanding itself

All poetry comes from repetition.

Maybe poetry took the life out of both of them,
Idea and friendship.

AESTHETICS OF INTEGRITY
For every star in the sky
Someone is holding his ground.

AESTHETICS OF COMEDY ASLEEP
Don't wake the clown
Or he may knock you down.

You have enchanted me
with a single kiss
Which can never be undone
Until the destruction of language

I'm a writer who likes to be influenced.

AESTHETICS OF AVANT-GARDE THEATRE
Make the stage an actor
Make an actor the stage.

When you get an idea, go and write. Don't waste it in conversation.

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

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

Lies belong in poems

Poetry is a deliberate attempt to make language suggestive and imprecise.

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!

AESTHETICS OF OPERA
Don't sing an aria
To someone who can't
Sing one back.

If you want to know how much I love and care for you, count the waves.

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

A basso sings, and a soprano answers him.
Then there is thunder in a clear blue sky,
And, from the earth, a sigh: This song is finished.

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

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

You can't be too influenced by a great poet. You simply have to live through it.