Kenneth Koch - Best Quotes

Travel

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

Poetry

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.

Poetry

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.

Kenneth Koch

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.

Poetry

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.

Kenneth Koch

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.

Poetry

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

Kenneth Koch

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

Poetry

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.

Kenneth Koch

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.

Good

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.

Kenneth Koch

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.

Hot Quotes

In my world history comes down to language and art. No one cares much about what battles were fought who won them and who lost them – unless there is a painting a play a song or a poem that speaks of the event.

A compromise is the art of dividing a cake in such a way that everyone believes he has the biggest piece.

Wushu is a move in Chinese a physical move. An attack. Wushu is like an art.

My first love is art and I see a lot of things in an artistic way.

The idea of avant-garde art is a very suspicious thing to me the idea that poetry is new and it keeps being new the way Chevrolets every year are new.

Any work that aspires however humbly to the condition of art should carry its justification in every line.

When thou art at Rome do as they do at Rome.

Rock isn't art it's the way ordinary people talk.

Tell me thy company and I'll tell thee what thou art.

Book-jacket design may become a lost art like album-cover design without which late-20th-century iconography would have been pauperized.

Art is nature speeded up and God slowed down.

Author: Kenneth Koch

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.