Kenneth Koch Quotes

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!

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

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.

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.

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

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