quotes from classic

Some people who write about poetry seem to have had trouble with my poetry because it is sometimes comic. I don't think the nature of my poetry is satirical or even ironic, I think it's essentially lyrical, but again I don't know if it's my position to say what my poetry is like.

more quotes from Kenneth Koch

I also have travelled in Africa, so there are about seven or eight stories about Africa. I've also been to China, so there are five or six stories about China, and some about Mexico. I was a little surprised after I'd completed the book to see how many took place in other countries.

more quotes from Kenneth Koch

I mean, there are excesses all over the place. People are always saying what are the different schools of American poetry.

more quotes from Kenneth Koch

It takes a long time to publish a book.

more quotes from Kenneth Koch

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

more quotes from Kenneth Koch

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

more quotes from Kenneth Koch

I simply was ignoring the fact that The Waste Land indeed made it seem to many poets that one had to be depressed-not that The Waste Land is a bad poem, it's a wonderful poem-that one had to feel despair, that one had to think that the modern world was terrible.

more quotes from Kenneth Koch

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.

more quotes from Kenneth Koch

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

more quotes from Kenneth Koch

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!

more quotes from Kenneth Koch

Treading the soil of the moon, palpating its pebbles, tasting the panic and splendor of the event, feeling in the pit of one's stomach the separation from terra... these form the most romantic sensation an explorer has ever known... this is the only thing I can say about the matter. The utilitarian results do not interest me.

more quotes from Vladimir Nabokov

Imagination, the supreme delight of the immortal and the immature, should be limited. In order to enjoy life, we should not enjoy it too much.

more quotes from Vladimir Nabokov

Discussion in class, which means letting twenty young blockheads and two cocky neurotics discuss something that neither their teacher nor they know.

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Let us wait for the page proof.

more quotes from Vladimir Nabokov

I think it is all a matter of love the more you love a memory, the stronger and stranger it is.

more quotes from Vladimir Nabokov

A masterpiece of fiction is an original world and as such is not likely to fit the world of the reader.

more quotes from Vladimir Nabokov

Rereading this novel today, replaying the moves of its plot, I feel rather like Anderssen fondly recalling his sacrifice of both Rooks to the unfortunate and noble Kieseritsky

more quotes from Vladimir Nabokov

That Dali is really Norman Rockwell's twin brother kidnapped by gypsies in babyhood.

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To a joke, then, I owe my first gleam of consciousness—which again has recapitulatory implications, since the first creatures on earth to be...

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Whether or not his newspaper and a set of senses reduced to five are the main sources of the so-called "real life" of the so- called average m...

more quotes from Vladimir Nabokov