quotes from classic

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.

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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.

more quotes from Kenneth Koch

I'm a writer who likes to be influenced.

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

more quotes from Kenneth Koch

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

more quotes from Kenneth Koch

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

more quotes from Kenneth Koch

Also, I liked John Cage's music. I liked it for its craziness, the use of silence, the boldness-anything to get me away from writing about... I don't know what academic poets write about.

more quotes from Kenneth Koch

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.

more quotes from Kenneth Koch

I took a course at Harvard with Delmore Schwartz, a writing course, and there were about 30 of us... I don't really see vast movements full of wonderful poets all over the place.

more quotes from Kenneth Koch

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.

more quotes from Kenneth Koch

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

more quotes from Kenneth Koch

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.

more quotes from Kenneth Koch

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.

more quotes from Kenneth Koch

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.

more quotes from Kenneth Koch

I think my poetry was very influenced-it seems almost dumb to say it-but it was very influenced by Shakespeare. Very early on I read his plays... and, I don't know, I started speaking in blank verse at a rather early age.

more quotes from Kenneth Koch

There was a certain amount of humour in all our work... Maybe you can almost characterise the poetry of the New York School as having as one of its main subjects the fullness and richness of life and the richness of possibility and excitement and happiness.

more quotes from Kenneth Koch

Of course, I like Byron enormously; I'm crazy about Don Juan. And of course Keats and Shelley and I suppose everyone that everyone likes.

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As charming as old people are, one doesn't want to have a 75-year-old baby. One wants to make something new.

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As I understand the surrealist program, it was programmatically in favour of the unconscious as opposed to the conscious; programmatically in favour of chance, even programmatically in favour of a certain kind of violence and all that dream stuff.

more quotes from Kenneth Koch

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.

more quotes from Kenneth Koch