Kenneth Koch's 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.

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

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

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

I'm a writer who likes to be influenced.

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

It takes a long time to publish a book.

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

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

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

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

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

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!

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.

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.

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 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.

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 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.

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.