Kenneth Koch Quotes

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

One Trouble With A Kind Of Falsely Therapeutic And Always Reassuring Attitude That It Is Easy To Fall Into With Old People, Is The Tendency To Be Satisfied With Too Little.

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.

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.

You Can't Be Too Influenced By A Great Poet. You Simply Have To Live Through It.

It's A Well Known Thing That Ordinary Perceptions Can Have A Strange Aspect When One Is Travelling.