Quotes by Kenneth Koch
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The subject matter of the stories on the surface... there seem to be a number of stories about travel.
I certainly have the feeling that I'm the same person even though I've changed a great deal.
I'm a writer who likes to be influenced.
I certainly think it's worth making an effort to write about certain important things, as I made an effort to write about the war.
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.
I've written fiction before... I had tried to write stories, almost true stories before, but I never had found a way to do it.
It seems everything is so full of possibilities one can hardly take it all in.
It's not that I was indifferent ot the horrors of war, because that's what inspired the poem to a large extent, but I couldn't write about them.
It's enormously cheering to get a good review by someone who seems to understand your work.
I discovered modern poetry I think quite late, when I was 17, through an anthology, a Louis Untermeyer anthology. Of course, I was crazy about modern poetry as soon as I discovered it.
I saw a way that I could write fiction about my own experience and things that I've done and imagined. I was very interested to be writing these stories because I found that, like a certain kind of magnet, writing prose picked up details that my poetry had never been able to pick up.
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.
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.
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.
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.
He's come to die Or else to laugh, for hay is dried-up grass When you're alone."
"Something there is that doesn't hump a sump," He said; and through his head she saw a cloud That seemed to twinkle.
As the adjective is lost in the sentence, So I am lost in your eyes, ears, nose, and throat—...
I chopped down the house that you had been saving to live in next summer....
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